


All Along the Watchtower

by leonidaslion



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Apocalypse, Dubious Consent, Hell, M/M, Minor Character Death, Wincest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-10
Updated: 2011-04-10
Packaged: 2017-10-17 22:06:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonidaslion/pseuds/leonidaslion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the world explodes in a heatless, formless flare of red light, Dean isn’t awake to see it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sendthewolves](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sendthewolves/gifts).



> A spn_j2_xmas gift.

Dean doesn’t consider what it’s going to do to Castiel until the ritual’s all but done, and by then it’s too late. He and Sam are both bleeding out—they’ll be dead within minutes unless they finish this, and maybe even if they do.

“Dean,” Sam pants weakly.

Sam’s skin is slick with blood—it’s dripping from his hair, from the tip of his nose—and Dean isn’t doing any better. The handprint on his shoulder burns like a mother, the tiny _(and not so tiny)_ gashes in his skin sting, reddened sweat is dripping in his eyes, and his head’s spinning from all the blood loss.

And he isn’t going to get a chance to say so long to Cas, who may be an angel, yeah, but he’s still Dean’s friend, and he had their backs through this clusterfuck—kept him and Sam off the radar while they searched for a way out, saved Dean’s ass more than once—

“Dean,” Sam says again, softer but more urgently.

Right.

“Sehrus,” Dean mumbles, and feels the ritual lash through his body again. This time it’s his wrist that splits open, although there’s no spurt of blood. Not enough left for his heart to expel more than a weak trickle.

“Gegrahi,” Sam offers, resting his hand on the center of the charcoal design they spent the last twenty-four hours laying out before getting down to business. “Frehar ch-chalil.”

“Frehar chalil,” Dean echoes, making a supreme effort and getting his own hand on top of his brother’s.

He can feel their blood mingling as the ritual opens his throat—ancient power, something tasting of black space and stillness: a power from the time before good and evil even existed—and it hurts more than the rack ever did. It feels like his soul is being torn apart all over again, this time all at once, instant and merciless. His shoulder seems to have been dipped in molten lava.

Sam’s hand is twitching beneath his—Sam’s throat making the same, pained gurgle Dean knows is coming from his own mouth as energy builds and crackles around them—and somehow Dean manages to make his muscles work well enough to lace their fingers together. He doesn’t know if Sam wants the reassurance right now—he can’t read Sam anymore, maybe never could—but Dean doesn’t care because _he_ needs it, damn it. If this is going to be his last moment, he needs to go out knowing that he isn’t alone. Even if it feels like he is.

There’s a brush of air over his face—open window, Dean thinks, only he’s sure Sam closed everything up tight when they began—and then a shocked gasp.

“Dean,” someone says above him. That voice is far too strong to belong to Sam, and anyway Sam’s on the floor with Dean—Sam’s blood is puddling on the floor and mixing with his _(demonic-taint with angelic, just what the ritual called for)_ and the whole hot, coppery mess is getting in Dean’s mouth. Dean’s heart falters as the ritual builds inside his body, stronger than his heartbeat ever was, and his mind starts to float away on a sea of agonizing red.

“Dean,” the voice says again. “What have you done?”

With the lucidity that covers the edges of death like a film, Dean recognizes the hoarse tones this time. _Cas,_ he thinks as the angel’s hands fumble frantically at his skin. _Sorry._

His breath eases out—his last breath, echoing Sam’s beside him—and the ritual snaps to completion.

When the world explodes in a heatless, formless flare of red light, he isn’t awake to see it.

Dean wakes again to his brother dragging him across the floor of the room, and he lets out a groan of protest. His entire body aches, leaden and weary. He feels feverish; weak as a newborn kitten. He doesn’t know how the fuck Sam’s even vertical, when he can’t even stand being moved like this right now.

“Sorry,” Sam mutters, but he doesn’t sound all that sorry to Dean. “Can’t lift you.”

 _So leave me here,_ Dean wants to say. After all, that’s what Sam’s good at. Except then he glances down at himself—blood congealing on his body, more on the floor—and fuck did all that come out of them? He guesses that he gets why Sam wants to get them both out of this place: looks like a slaughterhouse. Reeks like one too.

“Can you talk?” Sam checks as he starts hauling on Dean again, sweat pouring off him and raining reddened drops onto the floor.

Dean doesn’t know, and he isn’t feeling all that chatty at the moment anyway, so he closes his eyes and drifts off again.

For almost a full week, Dean drifts in and out of consciousness. Sometimes Sam is sitting next to him, sometimes Dean can hear his brother putzing around elsewhere in the house where they’re squatting. Most often, there’s only dark silence around him, broken occasionally by the habitual noises of an unfamiliar place, and then Dean is sure that Sam is dead or gone, has left him yet again.

His feverish mind mixes up the timing, and he thinks first that Sam’s at Stanford: that he’s waiting for Dad to come back and pour some cough syrup down his throat. Cough syrup because he’s sick, he knows that much. If he were injured it’d be whiskey, or gin, or whatever hard alcohol is at hand to souse him up so that he won’t squirm too much when Dad cleans the wound and sticks the needle in him.

Only then he remembers it’s later than that, remembers Dad is missing, and thinks he just left Sam standing in the middle of the road on his way back to California.

 _No,_ Dean thinks, cracking his eyes open wide enough to look at the faintly glowing stars some kid _(dead or good as now, probably, like most of the world)_ glued there. His mind clarifies for a moment, the present chaining him down, and he opens his mouth to rasp, “Dad’s dead.”

Then time flick-flicks on him, skidding forward a notch before falling back again and leaving him completely disoriented. He’s lying in bed alone in a strange place, sick with fever and an aching, useless body, and Sam is Gone. There’s no surprise in his chest at that: nothing but a faint, bitter pulse.

 _Back with Ruby again,_ he thinks, and then loses interest with the whole mess and drifts off.

As little as Dean is capable of piecing together a timeline in this state, he always expects Sam to stay gone—expects to wake to continued silence and an increasing sense of isolation as his body gives out on him—but Sam keeps coming back. He even brings candlelight once, illuminating the room in flickering, warm tones.

The light is a nice change after so long in the dark, and Dean means to say something but then he remembers that he’s pissed at Sam for running across the street without waiting for him, and Sam is only six and way too young to be pulling that kind of crap, and Dean’s not talking to him. He shuts his eyes and goes back to sleep instead.

When he opens his eyes again, he knows when he is _(interesting change of pace)_ and there’s the familiar scent of cooking meat in the background. There’s a hand between Dean’s shoulder blades, lifting him up off the bed. Dean rolls his eyes to the side and it’s Sam. Sam easing in between Dean and the headboard and resting Dean’s body against his own.

Dean’s too tired to process so much body-to-body contact, so he settles for watching the way the candlelight catches in Sam’s hair and eyes. The way it makes Sam’s eyes shift back and forth between black and gold.

“I know you’re sick, but you’ve gotta eat,” black-eyed Sam says, and then gold-eyed Sam presses something hot and spongy against Dean’s lips. Hot dog, Dean thinks from the taste. It’s just a small piece, already cut up, but Dean’s pretty sure he isn’t interested. Not that he can stop Sam from pushing the hot dog past his teeth—Sam’s fingers inside his mouth, touching his tongue.

Then Sam’s fingers are gone, leaving the chunk of processed meat behind. Dean rolls the weight of it around and tries to remember what to do with it.

“Come on, man,” Sam says from somewhere beyond the universe of Dean’s mouth. “Don’t do this. Don’t leave me.”

Dean’s not so out of it to recognize that that’s a fucking laugh, coming from Sam, but the fever is dragging him under again. The grin he starts to crack turns into a gape and the chunk of hot dog tumbles out of his mouth and onto his chest.

“Dean,” Sam says from behind him, sounding frantic and needy in a way he hasn’t in years. A hand paws at Dean’s face—at his cheek—and he’s back in the warehouse again, hanging from his hands with a needle in his neck. There’s a djinn around here somewhere, gonna try and hurt Sammy; Dean needs to get free.

Something dry and soft brushes Dean’s lips—another mouth that shouldn’t be there, that wasn’t there anywhere in Dean’s memories, and it’s even more disorienting. His mind reels back, startled and confused.

“Don’t you fucking leave me, you hear?” someone pleads. “God damn it, Dean. Fight this.”

But the voice is getting to be too distant to hear, and anyway Dean’s more concerned with outrunning the hellhounds trying to drag him down. It didn’t happen like this, out in the woods with rocks and branches to trip him up, but then again maybe it did. Maybe it’s happening right now, forty blood-soaked years nipping at his heels and echoing snarls through the skeletal trees.

So Dean runs.

There’s no gradual release. One moment he’s in a dazed fever-delusion _(something about clowns and Ruby and Sam with black eyes and vampire fangs)_ and then he opens his eyes and he’s in some kid’s room. Plastic, glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling; Yankees pennant on the grey wall. Dean is in a twin bed, drenched and shivering a little. The room is lit by thin slivers of sunlight coming through the boarded-up windows on the opposite wall.

He feels like he just got hit by a truck.

“Sammy?” he tries. There’s no response, but it didn’t come out as more than a whisper, so he gathers himself and calls again, louder, “Sam.”

The room is dim around him, and empty, and no one answers.

Way down deep, Dean feels a pulse of panic that he quickly smothers. Sam wouldn’t have dragged him out of that bloody room just to abandon him here. And there are fragmented memories of Sam caring for him—Sam pouring chicken broth and plastic-tasting water down his throat, Sam rolling him back and forth on the bed while he changed the soiled sheets out for clean ones. Sam wouldn’t have done that if he were just gonna up and leave without at least saying goodbye.

Dean’s sure of it.

Mostly.

It’s dark out before the door to the room swings open, and Dean is dozing—lightly enough that he comes awake at the faint squeal of hinges. He opens his eyes to see his brother’s form in the flickering light of a candle. He’s pretty sure it’s Sam, anyway. Suddenly, he’s remembering blurry images of Sam looking down at him with unpleasant colors in his eyes.

“Sammy?” he breathes.

Sam stiffens for a heartbeat before hurrying forward, one hand cupped protectively around the wick of the candle. The flickering flame is casting wobbly shadows everywhere, and when Sam leans over, Dean sees that his eyes aren’t the right color after all. It’s just reflected light, though—nothing sinister—and in his new, lucid state, Dean gets that. He relaxes minutely back into the bed.

“Dean,” Sam says, keeping his voice soft. “Hey, man. How’re you feeling?”

Dean takes a moment to lick chapped lips and then answers, “Like crap.”

Nodding, Sam sets the candle down on the nightstand and sits on the edge of the bed. “I felt like shit for a few days myself,” he says.

And he reaches out and slides his fingers up under Dean’s jaw to feel for his pulse.

It’s weird, having Sam touch him so intimately and casually after having spent the last few years dancing in painful, widening circles, and Dean flinches away a little without thinking about it. Sam blinks and takes his hand back.

“Sorry,” he apologizes, dropping his eyes. He lowers his head slightly with the motion, the fringe of his hair falling in the way and obscuring his expression. Not that Dean would have been able to read it anyway. “I—you’ve been out of it for a while, and I—I forgot.” He gets up off the bed, giving Dean that space back, but doesn’t step any further away.

Dean can’t tell whether he feels reassured by that or not.

“How come I got hit so hard?” he asks, setting his feelings on Sam’s proximity aside as irrelevant.

“I don’t think it was the ritual,” Sam admits, lifting his head again. “I’ve been outside, and there are a lot of people down with something. A lot of them are dying.” He pauses and then adds, “Firstborns.”

A weak shiver rushes through Dean’s skin at the announcement—at the knowledge of how close they cut it. “Death’s party favor,” he breathes, and Sam nods, confirming the guess.

“Whatever ritual he used, he didn’t get to finish it, though,” Sam says. “Some of them are getting better.”

 _You’re_ getting better.

Sam doesn’t say it, but Dean knows that he’s thinking it. Hell, Dean’s thinking it himself. He remembers how his chest twisted when they cornered Death a couple of months back, a pale man in a dapper red suit. You can’t kill Death, of course, but he and Sam gave it their futile best.

After, when Sam was unconscious and Dean was panting on the floor with two cracked ribs and a spinning head, Death crouched down next to him and announced, ‘I’m gonna do firstborns for my parlor trick. You should enjoy that one, Dean: it’s a classic.’

Son of a bitch must have been in the middle of putting his piece of the endgame in motion when their own ritual cut him short—had just enough finished to carry some off, but not all. Dean guesses he’ll feel grateful for that once he doesn’t feel so much like he just had a Buick dropped on him.

“War? Famine?” he checks. He doesn’t bother asking about Pestilence’s ‘parlor trick’: the disease people have taken to calling Doomsday had already carried off about half the world’s population before he and Sam found the ritual. It seems to be winding down now, though: probably so that the other Horsemen can take their own potshots at everyone still standing.

But Sam just shakes his head. “I don’t know. There’re still Croats running around, but no one I talked to knows if they’re still infectious. And I haven’t heard anything that sounds like Famine.”

Dean nods and closes his eyes. If they haven’t heard anything yet, then they probably won’t. Dean hopes they won’t anyway. Fuck, he’s tired of all this Apocalypse and Four Horsemen crap.

“Can you eat something now?” Sam says. “It’s been almost a week. I managed to get you to keep a little down, but ...”

Something about Sam’s words makes Dean’s chest tighten uncomfortably—something attached to a fragmented, feverish delusion of fingers in his mouth—but he shoves the feeling away and opens his eyes again, laboriously pushing himself up into a sitting position against the headboard. “Yeah. What’ve we got?”

“Franks and beans?”

Dean’s stomach rumbles at the prospect of solid nourishment, but he’s distracted by the return of that flutter. Some light, tentative pressure against his lips. Maybe that memory of fingers in his mouth—a memory associated with the taste of hot dog—wasn’t a delusion after all.

“That all you know how to cook?” he asks, checking.

“It’s what we have.” Sam’s voice is a little sharper than Dean thinks it should be—defensive. Although that could be Dean’s fault. Fuck knows he wasn’t keeping a close watch on his own tone when he asked the question.

Another wave of weariness washes over him as Sam walks away from the bed. He’s so goddamned fed up with all the bickering and pot shots, but at the same time he can’t figure out how to stop. Hell, the last thing he said to Sam before they started the ritual was ‘Just try not to get distracted by all the blood. Last fucking thing we need is for you to fall off the wagon halfway through.’

Sam didn’t respond to that, Dean remembers now, and he wonders if it’s too late to apologize.

“There’s no power,” Sam continues as he steps over a sleeping bag—has he been sleeping in here the whole time?—and crouches down in front of a battery-operated hotplate set up on the floor. “And I don’t know if we can trust the water—guy I talked to said the Croats infected a whole town in Connecticut by bleeding into the reservoir. There’s some bottled, but I figured we’d better save that for drinking.”

Dean magnanimously doesn’t mention that it wouldn’t matter if they held Sam down and poured buckets of infected blood into his mouth. Anyway, things might be different now that the ritual’s done: kid might not be immune anymore.

“So,” he says instead as Sam opens up a can of Campbell’s Beans ‘N Franks. “Did it work?”

Over by the hotplate, Sam stills. After a pause too long to be anything but awkward, he finally answers, “I don’t know.”

“You haven’t seen any, though, right?” Dean pushes. “No demons, no—Cas? You haven’t seen Cas?”

The silence actually deepens. Sam is still enough now that Dean isn’t even sure his brother is breathing, although the flickering shadows cast by the candle present at least the illusion of motion. Dean gives the moment as long as he can, waiting, but eventually he can’t pretend any longer that Sam’s going to answer.

“Sam?” he prods. “You seen Cas?”

“No,” Sam says finally, simply. And just like that, he’s moving again, grabbing a saucepan and dumping the contents of the can into it.

“Then it worked.”

“Maybe,” Sam hedges, as cautious as ever when it comes to truths rooted deep inside Dean’s soul.

And isn’t that the problem at the center of the void between them? Isn’t the sharpest thorn Sam’s inability to accept Dean’s word as good enough: to trust him to know anything on his own—to do anything but follow orders? Isn’t this about the way Sam decided caution was a thing to be applied to Dean’s judgment rather than his own? Isn’t it about the way he kept plunging full speed ahead when Dean was screaming at him to put on some fucking brakes and think about things for one goddamned minute?

Or maybe it’s just the fact that Sam threw Dean and everything Dean thought they had over for a cheap, black-eyed whore in a human-suit.

Sam apologized for that, and Dean accepted—what the fuck else was he supposed to do, throw Sam’s apology back in his face? Dean’s been trying to believe he meant it, too, really he has. It’s just pretty damn impossible to forget how it felt when Sam walked out on him for a demon. Harder still when Sam’s been pulling this ‘Sammy knows best’ crap over and over again, questioning Dean’s intelligence and intuition at every motherfucking turn.

Questioning whether he’s strong enough, or smart enough, or capable enough to lead. Like Dean doesn’t do enough of that already on his own.

 _Can’t you just fucking trust me for once?_ Dean thinks, staring at his brother’s back as Sam heats up the pot. But he doesn’t say anything.

Talking never solves shit.

Dean spends two weeks recovering from Death’s parlor trick, but as soon as he can manage to move on his own, he drags himself down to the Impala _(through a living room with more pictures on the wall than he wants to look at—doesn’t want to fucking know about the people who used to live here)_ and crawls inside. Passenger side, and fuck whether or not that makes Sam feel validated. Dean’s too damn exhausted from the walk out here to give a shit.

“Where to?” Sam asks as he buckles in and slides the key into the ignition.

Dean starts to shake his head as the faces of the dead flash before his eyes—Ellen and Jo gone in that suicidal attempt to take out Lucifer, Bobby taken by Pestilence’s plague, Cas ... Dean’s not entirely sure they didn’t just kill Cas. The ritual wasn’t all that specific on that front, and Dean was desperate enough at the time not to register much more than the phrase “forever cast from the earth”.

Then he remembers a glint of green eyes; rabbity twitch of hands; nervous quirk of a mouth. The one guy who’s been in their corner who they haven’t managed to kill yet.

“We should try to find Chuck,” he says. “Let him know he doesn’t have archangels on his shoulders anymore.”

“That he _might_ not have an archangel on his shoulder,” Sam amends.

“Dude, would you chill with the maybes already? Cas totally would’ve popped up by now if he could’ve.” Dean’s guilt over possibly offing the angel—his friend, if he wants to be honest—makes his voice sharper than he means it to be, although he supposes he’s grateful for the edge. It masks most of his regret—the mournful ache that has been set off in his chest at the memory of all the good people lost in this war.

Most of the time, the loss is too staggering to grasp, but every once in a while Dean accidentally focuses on a manageable portion and teeters on the edge of meltdown.

It’s like that body dump they drove past in Oakland at the height of the Doomsday Plague, only on a larger scale. Dean glanced at the mounds of the dead—some in garbage bags or other wraps, most exposed to the sky—and noted the size of the dump in the back of his head. It was too much to process, though, and he kept driving without a twitch.

His own flicker of comprehension came two weeks later by Bobby’s bedside, with the man’s cold, skeletal hand clutched in his own and Sam missing from the moment as usual. By the time his brother got back from hunting down some food, Dean had Bobby sewn up in a shroud of clean linen and waiting on the pyre he and Sam built in silence some days before in preparation of the inevitable. No body dump for Bobby, although the sight of the one in Oakland had been foremost in Dean’s mind as he lit the gasoline-drenched wood.

Sam hadn’t cried even then, the heartless bastard.

He seems as emotionless as always now, staring out through the front windshield at the eerily empty street. Dean would think his brother isn’t paying attention at all—that he’s checked out from the conversation—but then he catches the slight, stubborn twitch of Sam’s jaw. It’s one of the few expressions Dean recognizes these days, and he always mixes it up with the way Sam looked in the motel room, cold and haughty and distant, while Dean lay gasping for breath on the floor.

‘You walk out that door, don’t you ever come back,’ Dean panted, straining to claw through that mask to the brother he was sure, even then—even after all of the betrayals and the lies and the obvious disdain—lay beneath.

Except Sam turned and walked away.

“Yeah, fine,” he says now, glancing out the window to his right. “Go ahead and keep on waiting for Gunga Din, then.”

“Godot,” Sam corrects, putting his hand on the gearshift.

 _Whatever,_ Dean thinks as he leans his head against the window, eyes scanning the vacant street littered with roving newspapers. Four months old now, Dean guesses: it’s been at least that long since there was enough of a society left to care about things as mundane as the daily news.

There are towels hanging from most of the mailboxes—light colored—signs of sickness within, asking the authorities for help that never came. The shades in the windows are down, all the curtains pulled, and Dean imagines the uncollected bodies lying still and peaceful in the darkness within. He wonders if there were any bodies in the house Sam picked out for them, or whether Sam found the place mercifully abandoned, and then decides he doesn’t want to know.

But he can’t stop thinking about all of the dead as Sam gets them moving. Bodies stiff like chunks of wood, and cold, and decaying in silence. Summer’s on the way, and then autumn will come, bringing rain, and new diseases will breed in the dead flesh, paving the way for fresh bouts of sickness and death—ghosts aplenty too, because the world’s just that fucked.

The ritual worked—Dean’s knows it did, no matter what Sam says—only he thinks now that maybe it was already too late. Maybe it was long past time to save anything at all.

 _This is the way the world ends,_ Dean thinks, and closes his eyes.

Chuck is right where they left him, huddled in his house behind boarded up windows and a reinforced, padlocked door. It takes almost half an hour of pounding on the door and shouting the guy’s name before there’s a timid, “Dean?” from inside the house.

“Yeah,” Dean answers, rubbing the sore side of his hand. “Open up already and let us in.”

“How do I know you’re you and not one of them?”

 _Croats_ he means, which indicates that there are some in the neighborhood. It’s a reasonable question, but something about the whole situation strikes Dean as ludicrously cliché—like he somehow wandered into a bad horror flick—and he glances over at Sam, ready to roll his eyes.

Sam has his back turned, though, hands shoved into his jacket pockets as he scans the street for signs of trouble. Used to be, he would’ve known Dean wanted to share a moment before Dean did. Used to be, Dean only ever had to glance to his right and Sam was there, looking back at him.

Used to be a lot of things.

“You don’t,” Dean calls, giving himself a shake and turning back to the door. “But if you don’t open up right fucking now, Sam and I are breaking down the door and shoving the pieces so far up your ass you’ll be shitting splinters for a month.”

There’s a brief pause and then, almost too hushed for Dean to catch, a muttered, “Yeah, it’s them all right.”

He can feel Sam’s eyes on him this time—Sam questing for a companionable glance. But Sam wasn’t there for him a minute ago, and damned if Dean’s going to give him the satisfaction. This is a two-way fucking street; he isn’t here to play Sam’s wingman.

Dean turns his face the other way, pretending to watch for any approaching Croats. After a couple of seconds, he feels Sam give up on him and knows that it’s safe enough to turn his attention back to the door without the risk of catching his brother’s eye. The disconnect between them isn’t any more comfortable when Chuck finally lets them in a couple of minutes later, opening the door wide enough for them to slip through past the bulky blockade of an old bureau.

He shuts the door again as soon as they’re clear, and starts resetting the seven deadbolts and chains he had installed before things went to shit.

“Man, am I glad to see you guys,” he says as he works, casting a quick glance over his shoulder. “I thought you were dead for sure.”

“How’s that?” Dean asks.

“Last thing I saw, you both looked like you’d been put through a cheese grater,” Chuck answers, hurrying around to the other side of the bureau. “Gimme a hand?”

Dean does, feeling Sam set his own strength to the push as well _(their shoulders brush with the effort, casual contact Dean’s startlingly aware of these days)_ , and the bureau slides back into place effortlessly. Dean rests his hand on top of the wood as he straightens, turning to Chuck.

“The ritual?” he checks. “That’s the last vision you got?”

“I—I dunno. Is that what that was? You guys were in a room, and there was this black design on the floor, and there was all this blood—”

Dean nods. “Yeah, you don’t have to describe it. We were there.” Actually, Dean would prefer if Chuck didn’t describe it. His memories of the ritual and what followed are pretty hazy, but he remembers enough for body and soul to give a pained, aching pulse at the reminder.

“How’d you guys get out of that?” Chuck asks, glancing between them. “You don’t—you don’t look hurt at all.”

“Fringe benefit of finishing the ritual,” Sam says.

“And you knew that going in?” Chuck’s peering up at them like he doesn’t quite believe it, which just goes to show how sharp the guy can be sometimes. Dean just looks back at him steadily until he drops his eyes; senses Sam watching Chuck with his own inscrutable expression to Dean’s left. Chuck shakes his head and turns away, wandering deeper into the house. “Christ, you two are nuts. What were you trying to do, anyway?”

He grabs a bottle of alcohol off the top of the dust-covered TV, takes a swig, and then turns around and holds it out in offer.

Dean takes the bottle, giving Sam a chance to answer and redeem himself slightly—Chuck’s visions stopping with the ritual is just another pretty irrefutable chunk of evidence in the ‘It Worked’ column—but Sam just stands there quietly while Dean drinks. Stubborn bitch.

Annoyed, Dean hands the bottle back to Chuck without offering it to his brother and says, “We pulled in the welcome mat—to both sides. You don’t have to worry about peeping toms in the shower anymore.”

“The angels?” Chuck says, sounding just as confused and bewildered as always—although that might just be because he senses how askew things are between them, because the concerned, questioning look Chuck’s giving Dean while he hands the bottle over to Sam has nothing to do with the End of Days.

“The ritual was supposed to close the world off to both Heaven and Hell,” Sam says. “So no more angels or demons should be able to get in, and any that were here should have been forced out.”

“Really?” Chuck says, brightening. “And it worked? No more Lucifer-Michael death match?”

“I dunno, Sammy,” Dean says, glancing sideways at his brother. “You want to weigh in on this one?”

Sam’s staring down at the bottle, little tension lines around his mouth and eyes, but after a moment he gives a tiny shrug and says, “It worked.”

Dean bites his tongue, because he’s awesome like that.

Chuck just stares for a moment, like he didn’t quite understand what Sam said, and then smiles, wide and relieved. “Well shit! That calls for a real celebration. Let me break out the good stuff.”

The ‘good stuff’ turns out to be 40-year-old, single malt Glenlivit, which is mighty fine indeed, and it doesn’t take long before Dean’s sitting with his head lolling back against the couch and nursing a pleasant buzz. Chuck’s in a ratty armchair, curled up and snoring with his head against the arm, and Dean guesses he isn’t surprised the guy went under so quickly. Chuck never struck him as the well-rested type—not that Dean blames him, the dreams he’s been forced to put up with.

He wonders for what has to be the hundredth time whether the man got a ringside seat to Dean’s time in Hell, or if the angels let him skip that bit.

Sam pads back into the room, swaying a little, and tosses a bag into Dean’s lap before collapsing down on the couch next to him. Dean looks down at the bag—Cheetos—with a slight frown before remembering that he demanded sustenance a couple minutes ago. He wasn’t talking to anyone in particular at the time, and he doesn’t remember Sam saying anything in response, but ...

“Thanks,” he says, opening the bag and digging in. The Cheetos don’t really taste like much of anything—maybe because they’re stale, or maybe just because the Glenlivit has burned off all his taste buds—but he keeps eating them anyway. Sam got them for him, after all, which is enough to count as a Gesture these days. Besides, he needs to do something to distract himself from the way Sam is unabashedly staring at him.

“I’m sorry,” Sam says now—slurs really. Dean’s pretty sure the kid drank more than he did, and Sammy’s always been a lightweight, despite his size.

He shrugs, plunging his hand into the bag again. “No biggie. The important thing is that neither of us has to worry about getting all dolled up for the Prom anymore.”

“I used to have nightmares about it,” Sam says in a soft, confessional voice. “I dreamed about coming back to the motel room to find you—you were sitting on the bed, waiting for me, only you weren’t—you were Him instead. Michael.”

“Yeah, well, at least you never actually had to see it for real,” Dean can’t help muttering. His not-brother’s face, at once so familiar and so strange, flickers in his memory and he scrunches his eyes shut and tosses an arm over the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know what was worse—fact that you actually caved for that son of a bitch or seeing you in that fucking suit. Wearing loafers.” He gives his head a tiny shake, which makes the couch spin beneath him. He may possibly be drunker than he thought. “I dunno how the fuck you ever could’ve said yes.”

Sam’s silent for a couple of minutes and then he says, “I do.”

Dean glances over, surprised, and Sam’s closer than he has been in a long time. Closer than Dean was expecting or is comfortable with, really. Sam’s eyes are unfocused, all of his haughty walls melted with drink, and Dean’s chest gives a flutter at the expression he finds on his brother’s face—nothing he recognizes, which is par for the course, but there’s something in this look that almost feels familiar. Like he’d understand it if he were a little less drunk—or maybe just a little less terrified of what it might mean.

 _Look away,_ he tells himself, but of course he can’t. Instead, he opens his mouth and says, “Yeah? Why’s that?”

Sam sways closer—close enough for Dean to smell the alcohol on his brother’s breath—and Dean leans back automatically. It isn’t about Sam, really—a little about the flicker of similar memories from Hell; even more about the fact that having their foreheads crack together would really hurt—but even as drunk as he is, Dean doesn’t miss the flash of hurt in his brother’s eyes. He considers apologizing and then doesn’t say anything. His chest is still all light and shuddery; his stomach uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to encourage Sam to keep on doing ... whatever he was doing.

He watches as his brother struggles to his feet while wiping a hand over his face.

“Fuck, ‘m drunk,” Sam announces.

“So go sleep it off,” Dean suggests, pulling out another handful of Cheetos to mask just how naked he suddenly feels. How off balance.

He wishes Chuck was awake.

But Chuck isn’t awake and Sam is just standing there, swaying almost imperceptibly while he stares down at Dean. After a few, agonizing minutes, he steps forward, unheedful of Dean’s feet. Dean moves them out of the way before Sam can step on them, the big oaf, but Sam doesn’t seem to notice as he moves between Dean’s spread legs and tips forward. He catches himself on the couch back and the arm to Dean’s right—just in time to avoid crashing into Dean’s lap—and wow, this is making Dean appreciate his personal bubble way more than he ever has before. Funny how you never notice that invisible ring of space until someone’s crowding you up and making it difficult to breathe right.

“Little close,” Dean offers, keeping his voice light.

Sam ignores him. “What would it’ve taken for you?” he demands instead. “To say yes to Michael?”

“I wouldn’t’ve,” Dean answers.

“Never?”

Dean snorts, turning his face away since he doesn’t dare try pushing Sam up—kid’d probably lose his balance and wind up in Dean’s lap instead. “Fuck no. You think I was just gonna bend over and spread for those dicks?”

He can feel Sam’s eyes on him—Sam’s breath warm and moist as it ghosts over his cheek. It makes his stomach squirm, and he shifts against the couch, tightening his hands on the Cheetos with a rustle.

The moment stretches out, Sam’s regard steady and burning. Sam’s body closer than it has been in years: huge and hot and eating away at the resentful, hurt knot in Dean’s chest.

Then Sam says, “I would’ve done it for you. He came to me as Jess, but if he’d—” He stops abruptly—just fucking _stops_ —and Dean doesn’t know whether he wants Sam to finish or just shut the fuck up and go away so that they can both pretend this never happened. He glances up—means it to be a glance, anyway, but he gets caught in Sam’s eyes and can’t look away again.

And he’s sure, suddenly, that whatever this is, it’s going to change things between them forever.

Then Sam’s eyes widen, confused and slightly pained. “I think I’m gonna hurl,” he announces.

The prospect of getting covered in his brother’s puke snaps Dean out of his daze and he scrambles to his feet, shoving Sam back and then catching him before he can go down.

Dean just hopes the ceramic bowl he finds for Sam to toss his cookies in wasn’t a family heirloom.

Dean wakes in the morning to the sound of breaking glass. He jerks upright at the noise, dislodging Sam’s arm from around his waist and making the mattress creak alarmingly. Dean doesn’t know how they ended up sharing a bed—has only faint memories of polishing off the rest of Chuck’s booze—but even more unsettling is the way that Sam grabs at him as he starts to get up.

“Dean,” Sam slurs. He still sounds drunk—probably is: he took a break for a while after the ceramic bowl incident, but Dean seems to recall Sam matching him swig for swig at the end.

“Dude,” Dean mutters, left off-balance and distracted by the way Sam is gripping his side with one, oversized mitt. Fingers pushing up _under_ his shirt, and Dean’s really fucking ticklish there, thanks.

“ _Dude_ ,” Dean repeats, louder and more vehemently, and illustrates his point by shoving Sam’s hand away.

“Mmph?” Sam’s head comes up at that, and he blinks at Dean owlishly, like he expected someone else. Not that Dean is surprised, what with the way Sam’s acting. “Dean?”

“No, it’s the Queen of England. Get off me, bitch.”

And Sam is definitely still drunk, because instead of obeying he makes a confused, frowning face and reaches again.

“Sam!” Dean warns. He realizes his heart is pounding. His mouth is dry. His own hand is curled into a fist, and he’s pretty sure he’s one wrong touch away from doing his best to dislocate his little brother’s jaw.

And how the fuck did they wind up here? Since when has punching Sam been anything close to a default response?

Downstairs, a male voice rises in a guttural scream.

Dean rolls off his side of the bed without pausing to think, already sprinting for the door. He’s unarmed, but Chuck’s place is crammed with enough crap that there’s always a weapon at hand, and he grabs a convenient baseball bat _(signed by someone who’s probably dead)_ off the wall on his way down the stairs.

There are two voices now—one still filling the early morning with that mindless, raging scream and the other _(Chuck’s)_ shrieking Dean’s name. Behind him, Dean can hear Sam stumbling along and feels a momentary, uneasy twinge in his chest. Not six months ago, that twinge would have resulted in a barked order for Sam to wait upstairs, or at least to stay behind Dean, damn it, but today adrenaline brushes it aside without a second thought, and then Dean is down in the living room with Sam hot on his heels.

The living room is empty, but from here Dean can see the blurred motion of a fight in the kitchen, and anyway he can pinpoint the disturbance from the sound of things being knocked every which way as a burly, bloodied man slams Chuck from one counter to the next. Dean’s pulse kicks his heart up into his throat where it gets in the way of his breathing—a Croat inside the house, leaking infection all over the place _(and Sam is right behind Dean, too fucking close)_ —and then Dean is in the kitchen and swinging the bat in a short, brutal arc. The arc terminates in a sickening, wet crack as the bat connects with the Croat’s skull and sends a splash of blood and bone fragments and brain against Chuck’s kitchen cabinets.

The enraged screaming cuts off as the Croat drops immediately—dead weight. Chuck is still yelling, though, his eyes wide and glassy, and shit, the dude’s covered in blood. There’s too much of it for Dean to be able to tell if Chuck’s cut—if there’s any danger of infection, assuming that’s still a possibility anymore. Chuck doesn’t seem capable of answering that question for Dean right now, not as panicked as he is, so Dean follows his instincts and grabs the guy by the arm and hauls him in the direction of the downstairs bathroom.

The tub’s full—Chuck’s doing before the plumbing went—and Dean knows the guy’s saving it for drinking, but he doesn’t hesitate before lifting Chuck off his feet and dropping him in. Water splashes over the sides of the tub in a pink-tinted flood while Chuck curses, spluttering, and tries to flail his way back out. Dean ignores the feel of Sam’s eyes on his back—Sam standing in the doorway fucking judging him, like he has any better ideas—and gets a hand on Chuck’s head, forcing him back under.

He keeps Chuck in the tub for a while, letting him up to breathe every so often and ignoring Chuck’s increasingly weak protests. The water’s red by now, polluted, and Dean should be letting Chuck out but his knees aren’t ready to support him. Besides, if he stops struggling with Chuck, Sam’s going to notice how badly Dean’s hands are shaking.

When Dean finally chances a glance over his shoulder fifteen minutes later, past ready to stop his futile attempts to salvage the situation, Sam is gone. Dean’s struck by the unpleasant realization that he doesn’t know how long he’s been needlessly dunking Chuck in contaminated water—he didn’t notice Sam leave.

He wonders when things got fucked enough for Sam leaving to be a common enough occurrence to fly under the radar like that, and then decides that he doesn’t really want to know.

Chuck’s cut. He’s cut in a couple of places, actually—from getting knocked into the counters, from stray shards of glass. And there’s a perfect, bloodied imprint of human teeth sunk into his wrist.

“You got me into the water fast enough, right?” Chuck asks, freshly dried and redressed in an oversized, ratty bathrobe. He’s unconsciously hugging himself with his arms and looks about ten years old, scraggly beard notwithstanding.

Dean carefully doesn’t look over at Sam, who is sitting on the arm of the couch to his right. Doesn’t meet Chuck’s eyes either.

“Guys?” Chuck asks, voice cracking.

“It might not be contagious anymore,” Sam offers. “I mean, we sealed everything off, and that includes War. If the Croatoan virus is linked to him, the infection might not be active anymore.”

Dean wants to believe the words as much as Chuck clearly does, but he can’t shake the certainty that it’s the case of locking the barn doors after a rabid fox has gotten inside and bitten most of the horses. It’s death in the dark, now: in the close, suffocating dark with no way for the farmer to get back inside and save the healthy livestock from getting crushed or bitten to death when the rest go insane.

Fuck, maybe Dean should’ve just said yes.

“You know, I feel fine, actually,” Chuck says hopefully. “I mean, I’d feel different, right? If it was in me?”

Dean’s jaw clenches reflexively and he pushes to his feet with a suddenness that makes Chuck flinch. He ignores the claustrophobic, tight feeling in his chest and directs his gaze to the floor midway between his brother and God’s last prophet.

“I’m gonna board up the kitchen,” he announces.

If Sam says anything to excuse his behavior as he leaves, Dean doesn’t hear it.

By lunchtime, Chuck is snappy and churlish. Sweat drips down his cheeks and gets tangled in his beard. Dean doesn’t think the man notices. He hopes he doesn’t, anyway: it’ll be better if Chuck doesn’t see it coming.

They make it through the meal—stale pop tarts and Doritos eaten in the wreckage of the kitchen—and then, as Dean gets a broom from the closet and finally starts sweeping broken glass from floor, Sam comes up behind him. Sam steps close enough that Dean can feel his body heat and then stops, a hulking line of heat. The proximity is doing uncomfortable things to Dean’s stomach. His mind flashes back to this morning, which feels decades distant now, and for an instant he thinks Sam’s going to do it again. He thinks Sam’s going to slip an arm around his waist and pull him close, chest to back. He isn’t sure whether he’d do anything to stop him.

Then Sam says, “Chuck’s infected.”

Dean tightens his grip on the broom handle. It takes all of his willpower not to whirl around on his brother and lay into him—what the fuck does Sam want him to say to that? What does he want Dean to fucking _do_?

But of course, the answer to that is obvious. Sam wants Dean to do what he’s always done: get his hands dirty.

“I already killed someone today,” Dean bites out, careful to keep his voice soft enough that Chuck won’t hear. “It’s your turn.”

Sam makes a choked, hurt noise that makes Dean’s cheeks heat with a shamed flush. But the guilt only makes him angrier, and before he can think things through all the way he’s swearing and throwing down the broom and turning around and shoving Sam to one side.

Sam yells his name—like he didn’t just push Dean into this, the fucker—but all of Dean’s attention is on Chuck, who’s watching him come with a little bit of fear but already far too much mocking glee. Looks like he’s already more gone than not.

Good, that’ll make this easier.

But they had some good times, and Chuck’s come through for them more than once, so Dean still pauses to offer, “Sorry, Chuck.”

Chuck starts to bare his teeth in something that can’t decide whether to be a smile or a snarl and that’s when Dean brings his hand out from behind his back, pistol cocked and ready, and puts a bullet in his skull.

They burn the house when they leave—granting Chuck and the unnamed Croat at least a semblance of a proper funeral. Dean doesn’t say anything out loud, but as he sits in the Impala and watches flames eat up through the walls and wreathe the ceiling, he wonders—and not for the first time—whether the dead aren’t the lucky ones. He wonders if maybe he should saunter on up the walk and let himself back inside and just sit there until he doesn’t have to feel anything anymore either.

There’s a momentary glimmer of warmth against his shoulder—like a hand hovering with the intent to touch—but when Dean casts a glance his brother’s way, Sam’s hands are on his side of the car where they belong. He is looking at Dean, though, and maybe that’s what Dean felt: that steady, mournful gaze that strips away the last forty-three years and makes Dean’s head swim and his heart ache. He doesn’t know how to fuse that expression with the crumbling, dying world around them. Doesn’t know how to align it with what he and Sam have become.

“So,” Sam says after a long moment. “I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”

Dean isn’t sure if that’s an attempt at a peace offering or a thinly-veiled offer of a suicide pact. Either way, it’s as good a direction as any. He turns the car on with a shrug and shifts into reverse.

“Okay, but if you think I’m driving my baby off the side of a cliff, you’re fucking nuts.”

They run out of gas in Iowa.

Dean sees it coming miles away—sees it coming when they keep driving past barren, burnt out husks instead of gas stations; when the stations that haven’t exploded come up dry. He doesn’t yell when it happens. He doesn’t pitch a fit.

He just puts her in park and gets out, going around to the trunk to get his duffle.

“Hey,” Sam says, jogging around to him. “Maybe we can siphon some more gas from that car a couple miles back.”

“What, the one with the ‘Gone to get gas’ sign in the front windshield?” Dean asks. His voice comes out a little sharp, but Sam fucking deserves it for saying something so stupid.

For some reason, though, Dean’s chest clenches at the crestfallen expression his words put on his brother’s face.

Clenching his jaw, he hoists the duffle up onto his shoulder and drops the Impala’s keys carelessly into the dirt. He doesn’t look back as he heads back the way they came—there’s a town close enough to reach by nightfall, they can hole up in one of the abandoned houses.

Sam’s still for a few moments, and then Dean can hear his brother scrambling to gather his own belongings. There’s a jingle of metal as well—sentimental idiot retrieving the keys, like Dean’s ever going to need them again—and then the crunch of footsteps on gravel as Sam jogs to catch up. He falls in step to Dean’s right like he belongs there, and the thought that maybe he doesn’t anymore makes Dean feel twitchy and even more defensive.

“We can find some gas in town somewhere,” Sam says. “There’s bound to be a car with a full tank. We can drive back here and load up.”

Sam’s right, but Dean’s not so stupid he doesn’t get that they’d only be postponing the inevitable. Sooner or later—sooner, everything is sooner these days—there isn’t going to be another car. Isn’t going to be any more gas. Better it happened here, where they’re still relatively close to things, than in the wide open, desolate Midwest.

Dean squints at the blur of civilization on the horizon and gives a slight shrug of his shoulders.

“Naw,” he says. “Think maybe I’ll just walk for a while. Stretch my legs.”

For once, Sam’s smart enough to hold his tongue.

Dean spends the next few weeks stocking up on supplies. There’s no sporting goods store in town, but he manages to find a couple of decent, insulated sleeping bags and a portable grill in someone’s basement. Two corpses upstairs as well, which says that the camping equipment isn’t going to be missed.

He and Sam are going to need it if they’re walking from here on out. Especially if it’s going to be this cold at night.

Dean never thought of summer as chilly before, but he guesses that’s because the electricity kept everything warm. Or maybe the heat was just cast off from a couple of billion people sharing breathing space and rubbing elbows.

It’s perfectly normal to see your breath in the morning in mid June. Perfectly fucking normal to spend half the night biting down on a corner of the blanket to keep your teeth from chattering while your brother probably does the same in his own borrowed room down the hall.

Perfectly normal.

Sam follows him on his scavenging missions. Dean never asks him to come—tries sneaking out early a couple of times, just to get some much-needed distance—but Sam must be the lightest sleeper on the planet because he’s always there, tailing Dean and pretending to be absorbed in a piece of debris whenever Dean turns around. Like Dean’s going to buy that sort of coincidence when it’s just the two of them and a town full of corpses.

Sam’s constant attendance makes Dean feel itchy—like he somehow managed to get grains of sand caught under his skin and can’t get them out. He doesn’t like the way Sam’s attention makes his chest feel, not when this is just Sam running after the only human being in a hundred mile radius. Not when it isn’t about Dean, no matter how much he’d like it to be—and he’s never admitting that little bit of wisdom, not if Sam tries to pry it out of him with a crowbar.

Towards the end of the second week, Dean finds himself vaulting over a fence and sprinting down a back alley and darting inside a nearby house, and takes a moment to wonder what he’s doing. The moment of clarity hits him a few minutes later, when he’s pressed up against a wall listening for signs of pursuit, and he gets that he’s running away from Sam. He’s treating Sam like some kind of hostile tail to be lost, and he’s so fucking desperate to keep going now that he’s managed the trick—to split and keep running until he’s so lost Sam won’t ever be able to find him and sucker him in again—that he can barely breathe past the lump in his throat. He has to get out now, before he forgets why he can’t trust Sam and falls back into old, destructive patterns.

Except it’s already too late for that, because the thought of leaving Sam is enough to send shooting, eye watering pains through Dean’s chest. The most he can manage is a few hours, actually, and then he finds his course meandering back to their house in reluctant, narrowing gyres.

Sam is cross that night—spares a couple of words for Dean at most before disappearing into his room and slamming the door behind him. But the next morning, he’s downstairs again waiting for Dean to leave, and this time he sticks closer. It makes Dean feel trapped and claustrophobic again—Sam can’t do this to him, he can’t make Dean feel like this—and within half an hour, he’s crawls through some dude’s basement and out the far window while Sam stands watch over the house in front.

Sam doesn’t talk to Dean at all when Dean comes back that night. He’s waiting downstairs when Dean gets back, but as soon as Dean shuts the door Sam is up and hurrying toward his room, violence bleeding from the hostile lines of his back. Dean doesn’t bother chasing after him—mostly because he doesn’t have anything to say.

Sam’s waiting for him again the next morning, and this time Dean is determined to be good. He doesn’t want Sam to actually get fed up enough to leave, is the thing. He just ... he wants Sam pissy so that he can keep straight in his head how things are these days. How he and Sam are.

It isn’t until he turns around mid-afternoon to find himself alone—Sam gone, Sam vanished—that he remembers he and Sam aren’t actually anything at all anymore.


	2. Chapter 2

Dean is breathless with anxiety by the time he gets back to the house they’re squatting in. His chest hurts, heart pumping so fast he’s sure he’s going to keel over in full cardiac arrest at any second. He bursts through the front door, Sam’s name a panicked shout just behind his lips, and then draws up short as he hears Sam’s off-key singing _(some crap emo song)_ coming from the kitchen. The house smells funny—filled with a strong scent of something that's incomprehensibly like meat cooking.

After a few minutes, Dean gets his body working again and staggers the rest of the way in, shutting the door behind him. It isn’t anything but habit—not like they have to worry about someone breaking in and stealing their stuff or killing them in their sleep. If there were Croats here, he and Sam would have heard from them by now.

Sam has cleared off the kitchen counters and set up the portable grill, the window over the sink hanging open to let the smoke out. He’s poking what looks like a steak with a long fork—the rest of a deer carcass spread out on the kitchen table behind him. He looks up when Dean comes in, song trailing off as he offers a smile and a, “Hey.”

Dean snaps.

“Hey?” he repeats incredulously. “That’s what you’ve got? You fucking _vanished_ on me to go play Davy Crocket and all you can say for yourself is _hey_? I thought you were—I don’t even fucking know what I thought!”

He does, though. He knows exactly what he thought. He thought Sam left.

Again.

Sam’s calm in the face of Dean’s rage _(he’s angry, not scared:_ angry), and just stands there looking at him until Dean runs out of air and has to stop yelling.

Then he says, “Feels like shit when the shoe’s on the other foot, doesn’t it?”

Dean ... actually has no idea what to say to that. He stands there blankly, staring at his brother with his mouth hanging open and no words coming out. Sam nods at him like he just admitted something—worse, like he _apologized_ —and then goes back to poking the slab of venison.

“Don’t ever try to ditch me again,” Sam says.

 _Now_ Dean is thinking of things to say—he could point out that he wasn’t trying to ditch Sam, for one _(what Sam doesn’t know won’t hurt him)_ —but somehow nothing is coming out. Instead, he’s rubbing his chest with one hand and trying to decide if he’d get decked for going over there and putting his hands on Sam to make sure he’s real.

When Dean abandons his own room that night, dragging one of the sleeping bags into Sam’s room instead and tossing it onto the queen sized bed next to his brother, Sam wordlessly shifts over a little to make room.

“Sorry,” Dean grunts as he lies down. It’s the least he can do, since Sam is being so good about not rubbing his nose in the bed-sharing thing.

Sam doesn’t acknowledge the apology in so many words, but his “Night, Dean,” is almost as good as acceptance.

Wrapped in a sleeping bag in a stranger’s house, with the world slowly decaying around him and Sam breathing beside him, Dean sleeps better than he has in years.

They develop a kind of routine.

In the morning, Sam makes foul, too-strong coffee by straining grinds through boiling water. There’s no milk anymore, so it’s either use that powdered Coffee Mate stuff or learn to like having his mouth coated in that burnt, bitter taste. Sam solves the dilemma by pouring about five tablespoons of sugar into every cup, which makes Dean grimace quietly as he chokes his own down black.

After breakfast _(couple Twinkies)_ , they spend the rest of the morning going house to house and scavenging what they can. Dean left the bodies where they lay when he was doing this on his own—when he was still unsettled by his realization of how fucked the world is, was still trying to shake Sam off his tail—but it always left him with a bad feeling at the back of his head. A world of so many dead, unburied and unmourned, and fuck the moral ramifications, but that’s a hell of a lot of pissed off ghosts.

Now, when they find a new corpse, Sam helps Dean roll the poor son of a bitch into a sheet and lug it out into the middle of the street. Dean handles the salt and the lighter fluid while Sam says a few words—or sometimes, when he maybe senses that Dean is Not In The Mood, bows his head and stands vigil silently.

It nettles Dean, seeing Sam so unashamedly sorrowful, like he didn’t have anything to do with the rotting flesh and bones at their feet. Like he didn’t have his hand on the detonator same as Dean. Worst are the burns when Dean can’t convince himself otherwise: those clear, gut-wrenching moments when he understands that Sam may have finished it, but he started it, and he doesn’t ever get to take that back.

On those days, he moves away to perch on a nearby car while the body burns—never out of sight, but far enough away that Sam knows not to bother him. The respectful distance his brother keeps chafes even more, though: like sandpaper rubbing against a raw wound. Dean can feel Sam reaching out to him these days—senses their steps coming closer in line. It feels like coming home, like redemption, and Dean fucking hates it because he knows he doesn’t deserve it and couldn’t trust it even if he did.

But he doesn’t know how to stop himself from chasing after that connection either, and the inevitability of his fall galls him.

Once the sun is high in the sky—or once Dean’s stomach starts speaking up, whichever comes first—they bring their pillagings back to their house and then go down to the store. Dean steps in through the broken window, boots crunching on glass, and tries not to let the sound remind him of Chuck. He and Sam avoid the rotting mess in produce and along the unrefrigerated meat counters. The bakery is a bust as well, full of mold or stale hunks of petrified bread. But the middle of the store is ripe for pickings, and Dean chooses whatever he feels like on that particular day and brings it out into the fresh air to eat. Sam joins him there, already munching on a Slim Jim or fishing crackers out of a box, and their shoulders rub together as they eat silently and watch the tomb around them.

After lunch, there’s more scavenging and then, as the sun begins to set, hunting.

Dean doesn’t particularly like this part of their day—it feels too easy, like cheating, to take deer out from hiding the way they do. But they need to eat something other than processed crap, so he puts up with it. He even takes care of the butchering, which Sam never learned to do properly the few times Dad took them out when they were kids, before going outside and washing up with the increasingly sullied water trapped in the garbage can they left by the back door.

They talk a little during dinner. Stilted conversations at first, but gradually easing into easier rhythms. It’s reminiscing, mostly. People they knew, places they’ve been, memories they’ve shared.

It strikes Dean one night that they’re talking about their lives the same way he’s heard people talk at wakes—too heartily, concentrating on the good times like they can burn away the fact that there’s a corpse in the room. His eyes burn suddenly—fiercely—and he ducks his head, rubbing at them with one hand.

Sam breaks off mid-story to ask, “You okay?” in a sharp, frightened tone.

“’M fine,” Dean manages, pushing to his feet. “Got an eyelash in my eye. I’ll be right back.”

He thinks he’ll cry in the bathroom, but he doesn’t. He just stands there for long minutes studying his face in the mirror. The candle he brought in to light his way makes him look far older than his age—the moving shadows putting those forty years he spent in Hell back on. The sink feels slick beneath his hands—bloodied—and he flinches away from the phantom sensation of a scalpel carving through his ribcage.

He remembers the day he broke in crystal clarity—not because it was different in any way, but because it wasn’t. There wasn’t any excuse. He hadn’t forgotten Sam’s face _(fat fucking chance when that was the one Alistair wore most often, especially during their ‘special’ moments)_ ; they hadn’t devised any fresh torments. Thirty years of holding out and then one day he just ... he stopped. He said yes.

Just like he knows he would have said yes to Michael, given enough time.

When he finally comes back out, Sam is still sitting where Dean left him. He’s looking down at the warm beer in his hands, but he lifts his head at Dean’s approach, and the candlelight makes it look like there are flames caught in his hair. He looks younger through some trick of the shadows, looks all of seventeen, and Dean’s hands tremble with the sudden, insane impulse to go over there and crawl onto Sam’s lap and never let go.

Too many memories of Alistair, he guesses.

“You get it?” Sam asks, his voice soft with understanding.

 _No,_ Dean thinks, but he nods as he returns to his own seat. “Yeah, I got it.”

The rats come in early-July.

Dean wakes up with one of the fuckers crawling on his chest, lets out a yell and slaps it off onto the floor. There’s rustling from down there as well, of course, and he leans over the edge to see that the floor is moving. No, that’s not right: the scurrying, squeaking black tide is moving. Dean can’t actually see the floor through the press of rodents.

“Sam!” he barks, grabbing his gun off the nightstand and kicking another adventurous rat from the bed.

Some of the rats scatter when Dean plugs the first one, but the fresh blood is clearly a mistake because suddenly the mass of rats boils on top of the corpse in a frenzy of squeaking. Sam’s awake next to him now, wide-eyed and just as freaked as Dean, and Dean has to grab his shoulder to get his attention.

“When I say, we make a break for the other room,” Dean says. He waits long enough for Sam to acknowledge the plan with a nod and then lets loose, sending bullets ripping through the rats nearest the wall. The noise in the room rises to a high-pitched crescendo: rats scrambling over each other to get to the fresh food. As soon as Dean catches sight of floorboard in the middle of the room, he knocks Sam’s shoulder with the heel of his palm.

“Go!”

He feels like a bit of an ass, running from rats, but there’s no one here to judge and those fuckers are mean even when numbers aren’t on their side. The rats prove it by biting at his bare feet at he runs, and trying to scramble up his legs, and Dean’s stomach lurches as he steps wrong and feels the crack of breaking bones beneath his foot. But he doesn’t slow, right behind Sam as his brother dives for the hall, and ... there are more rats here, crap.

“Dean!” Sam shouts, and it’s _Do you see this?_ and _What the fuck do I do?_ at the same time.

Dean ignores the first question in favor of answering the second, yelling back, “Keep going,” and then shoving Sam to make him obey.

The other bedroom is a little clearer than the first—maybe only fifty of the filthy things in here—and Dean slams the door shut behind himself, locking them in. Kicking out with his feet to keep the rats off, he grabs a lamp off the nightstand and tosses it to Sam.

“Batter up!”

It takes then almost ten minutes to get them all, although by the end the rats are definitely running scared. When he and Sam are the only things breathing in the room, they collapse on the bed and stare blankly at the door, where they can hear the squeaking, scurrying masses still moving around. Tails and snouts keep appearing beneath the crack, but there isn’t quite enough room for any of the bastards to squeeze through.

“What the _fuck_?” Sam pants.

Dean shakes his head wordlessly and doesn’t answer.

They throw the dead rats out the window.

There are even more of the beasts outside, covering the lawn and the street like a furry flood, and Dean’s stomach turns, revolted, as they form mini-piles where each of the corpses hits, fighting with each other over their deceased comrades. He turns away as soon as he can, wiping his hands on his boxers and shivering, but he can still feel their sleek bodies against his palms that night when he goes to sleep, rats still massing in the hall outside the door.

It takes the rats three days to leave.

The grocery store is a fucking mess. There are a couple of rodent skeletons here and there, but otherwise nothing but fallen shelves and shreds of boxes. Most of the metal cans have been chewed open, and the glass bottles broke when they fell. Sam finds a jar of pickles that managed to escape unscathed and they share that between themselves, looking around morosely at the wreckage.

“We’re going to have to move,” Sam says.

Dean bites into another pickle and doesn’t respond.

“Dean.”

“We can still hunt.”

Sam laughs—a hollow, lunatic sound. “Hunt _what_? You think anything made it through that alive?”

“We did.”

And that’s the end of that conversation.

Hunting is harder, but true to Dean’s statement, there are still a couple of deer running around. Not as many, and most of them are limping, but still. On the first day, Dean takes down a big buck with a painful looking bite out of its haunch. Mercy killing, he figures: the wound probably would have gotten infected and dropped the buck in a week or so anyway.

Scavenging is both easier and more difficult after the rats. There aren’t any more rotting corpses to deal with, but the bones—picked clean and scattered around the rooms—are almost worse. And things that might have been useful are nothing more than trash now—blankets ripped to shreds, battery-operated transistor radio knocked off the shelf and smashed.

Sam really loses it over that one, as if there’s anyone left to contact with the thing. But he picks up the pieces, and yells, and hurls them around the room, and finally stands there with his head down and his shoulders shaking. Dean stands well back until it’s clear the danger is gone and then steps closer and says, “I bet I can fix that.”

Sam shakes his head. “What the fuck’s the point?” he demands, his voice wet and miserable. It’s the closest he’s come to saying anything negative since Chuck’s, and Dean is touching him before he realizes he intends to.

He expects Sam to jerk away—Sam hasn’t liked to be touched ever since Dean came back from Hell, or maybe that’s Dean, he can’t remember anymore—but instead Sam turns and grabs him back, hauling into a suffocating, close embrace. Sam’s shaking all over, Dean feels now—no, not just shaking but crying: his face is wet where he presses it against the side of Dean’s neck.

Dean’s brain locks up on him, but apparently his body still knows what to do without the help because he shifts his hold on Sam, running one hand up and down his brother’s back and stroking his hair with the other.

“Dean,” Sam chokes out. “ _Dean._ ” His hands fist the back of Dean’s shirt.

“Right here, Sammy. I’m right here.”

“Don’t leave me. God, Dean, please don’t.”

And that’s just a fucking moronic thing to worry about: Dean doesn’t care how messed up Sam is right now. “Dude, I’m not gonna leave you, Chri—”

The rest of the word doesn’t make it out because Sam’s mouth is there, and then Sam’s motherfucking _tongue_ , and holy crap. Holy crap, Sam is _kissing_ him.

Dean should probably be pushing his brother away, but he’s too stunned to do anything but stand there and take it. Stuttering bursts of memories he’d rather not think about go off in his head like camera flashes, leaving him blind and docile in the face of Sam’s unexpected assault. Sam’s hands move to Dean’s face, tilting him up for it and deepening the lock of their mouths, and fuck, where the hell did Sam even learn to kiss like this?

Then, just as suddenly as Sam grabbed Dean, he’s gone again, backing up and shaking his head.

“Oh, fuck,” he breathes. “Oh fuck, Dean, I’m sorry.”

Dean’s still a little distracted by the bitter past, but he reaches out anyway at the sound of his brother’s voice, automatically trying to regain contact. “Hey, man,” he says. “It’s okay, really.”

Sam flinches from his touch—which really fucking hurts, if Dean wants to be honest with himself—and skitters back. “ _Okay?_ How the fuck is that okay?”

Yeah, now that Dean’s brain is starting to wake up again, he realizes that Sam has a point.

On the other hand, Sam’s all that Dean has, and he sure as hell isn’t going to let some freaky response to stress mess that up for him. Besides, thanks to Alistair it isn’t like Dean hasn’t had to deal with anything like this before.

“You panicked, dude,” he says, shoving that false, white-eyed version of his brother from his mind. “You panicked, and I was here, and it just ... it’s stress. That’s all.”

That at least gets him Sam’s eyes, even if Sam’s expression isn’t anything Dean wants to see on his brother. Not that kicked, half-hopeful half-despairing glance.

“Could happen to anyone,” Dean adds, trying to fix it, but for some reason his words only make Sam’s lower lip quiver a little as he shakes his head.

Turning away, Sam scrubs a hand over his face and lets out a humorless laugh. “No, Dean. It really couldn’t.”

They don’t talk about the kiss. Which was clearly some kind of fucked up stress response, no matter what Sam said at the time.

Sleeping in the same bed with his brother is awkward for a couple of nights—mostly because those stupid memories are still stirred up and tainting everything—but Sam doesn’t do anything different from usual, and eventually Dean figures they’ve moved past it the same way they move past everything else.

One of these days, there’re gonna be too many skeletons to get the closet door closed again.

On July twenty-first, Dean gets up to find frost coating the windows. He stares at it for a few minutes before going downstairs to start boiling water for coffee.

When Sam joins him ten minutes later, the first words out of his mouth are, “It’s getting colder.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Dean mutters without turning around. He hops around a little on the linoleum, which is freezing even through his socks.

“This isn’t normal.”

Goddamn it.

“Just leave it alone, Sam.”

“We can’t just ignore what’s happening, Dean!”

“Well, I don’t want to talk about it right now, okay? It’s too early.”

“When are you going to want to talk about it?” Sam demands. “When there’s eight feet of snow outside and we’re snowed in?”

Dean’s jaw clenches and he tightens his grip on the counter.

Sam is silent for a long moment behind him, and then he says, “We have to go south. We don’t have the resources to stay here, and maybe ...” He trails off, and when Dean casts a glance over his shoulder he finds Sam frowning down at his hands with a contemplative expression.

“Maybe what?” he grunts, turning back around. “Maybe we’ll find survivors?”

“Maybe.”

“We haven’t seen anyone else since Chuck,” Dean points out. And lord knows that turned out well.

“Because we’ve been stuck here. In the bigger cities, maybe, there’ll be—”

“More Croats to rip everyone apart. Face it, Sam: everyone’s dead.”

“I don’t believe that,” Sam maintains. “I can’t. And I don’t think you do either.”

Maybe Dean doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean he’s feeling all that anxious to see anyone who isn’t Sam. He doesn’t want to have to face up to what he did any more than he already has. But he knows that they can’t stay here forever either, if only because Sam kissed him last week, and that ... the memory of that incident isn’t as unpleasant as Dean thinks it should be.

“One more week,” he hedges.

“Dean,” Sam says, gentle and coaxing. He steps closer and the skin on Dean’s back crawls, both dreading and anticipating what’s coming. “Leaving isn’t going to get any easier, and we’re. Dude, we’re ready.”

“I’m not.” Dean’s stomach is already knotted and tense enough that when Sam’s hand finally does settle on the small of his back, it doesn’t really change anything.

“Dean,” Sam says softly, the nearness of his voice making Dean shiver. “It’s time to say goodbye.”

Dean makes the long trek back on his own.

The Impala is still sitting where he left her, and isn’t going anywhere ever again even if Dean did come back with gas. Her wheels are shredded.

Fucking rats.

“Hey, baby,” he says, resting one hand on her side. She’s cold to the touch, lifeless, and suddenly Dean can’t hold it in anymore. He’s crying in the middle of a tomb with his head bowed and the wind freezing his tears on his cheeks.

He isn’t crying over the car—not really, even he isn’t that obsessed—but the Impala’s ... Well, it’s the Impala. He practically grew up in this piece of metal, almost died in it a bunch of times as well, and he fucked his first girl in the backseat when he was fifteen. He held Sammy in the passenger seat when Dad drove them away from the rubble that used to be their house, tears running down his cheeks and soot in his throat.

It doesn’t feel like it’s a car he’s abandoning by the side of the road.

“You and me,” Dean says when he can manage it. “We had some good times, didn’t we?”

He moves forward slowly, dragging his hand up along her sleek frame, and then gets in and sits behind the wheel. It seems even colder in here—cold enough that he’s shivering, even in his jacket and the three layers he has on beneath it. Dean settles his hands on the worn grooves in the steering wheel where they belong, thumbs wrapped around the leather, and stares out at the open road stretching out in front of him.

“You know the most fucked up thing, baby?” he says after a few minutes of silence. “I hate the thought of you sitting here rusting. Two billion corpses and I get all choked up over a hunk of fucking metal.”

The Impala, being a hunk of metal, sits there and doesn’t respond.

“Sam kissed me.”

Dean doesn’t know he means to say it until it’s done, and then he can’t take it back, as much as he wants to. He licks his lips, considering, and then says, “Sam kissed me, and I’m pretty sure he meant to.”

The words don’t sound as scary out loud as Dean wants them to.

Sam’s waiting for Dean when he gets back to town, two oversized camper’s backpacks on the ground at his feet.

“You ready?” he asks.

“No, but don’t let that stop you,” Dean answers smoothly as he stoops to grab one of the packs. It takes Sam’s help to settle it in place, and then it weighs a fucking ton, and Dean grimaces. “Oh man, this is gonna suck,” he grumbles as Sam shoulders into his own pack.

“Look at the bright side,” Sam grunts, fighting with a strap. “At least this way we’ll have time to stop and smell the roses.”

“Cause there are so many of those around lately,” Dean mutters under his breath. He reaches over, helps Sam get straightened out, and then shoves his hands in his pockets.

“Oh,” Sam says, patting down his front. “Hang on, I’ve got ...” A moment later, he tosses something over at Dean. A jangling glint of metal flashes through the air and then Dean’s holding a useless set of keys. When he glances at Sam’s face, Sam carefully isn’t looking back.

The way that the sore, bruised place in Dean’s chest seems to sharpen suddenly makes him want to drop the keys—Sam won’t be bending down to get them this time, not with that pack on his back—but after a few moments of hesitation he pockets them instead.

“Thanks.”

Sam nods, eyes suspiciously wet, and they start walking.

They’re two days out from the town Dean never bothered to get the name of when it starts to snow.

“What do you think’s causing it?” Sam asks that night, watching out one of the windows of the church they’re squatting in as the flakes drift down.

Dean shrugs as he upends a can of green beans into a bowl they found in the rectory. They’ll taste like crap cold, but they’re low on fuel for the portable grill, and he and Sam are both going to come down with scurvy unless Dean starts watching what they eat more closely. Maybe he should pick up some vitamins at the next drugstore they pass.

“My guess?” he says, setting the empty can aside and opening a jar of peanuts. “This is Famine’s party favor.”

The rats too, probably, but Dean doesn’t bring that particular plague up.

Sam turns around at Dean’s announcement, eyes wide and mouth hanging slightly open in surprise. Dean waits for his brother to follow the logic and come to the same conclusion Dean did back when he started hunting around for cold weather gear in early June. When comprehension hits and Sam’s face falls, Dean nods.

“Pretty ingenious, really. Drop the temperature forty, fifty degrees and bam. Insta-food shortage. Especially when there aren’t enough people left to keep the electricity running for hothouses.”

“Everywhere?” Sam asks, looking at Dean like he has all the answers. “You think this is happening everywhere?”

Dean should probably lie. It’d make Sam feel better for all of the thirty seconds or so he’d let himself live in denial. Instead, he says, “Two world-wide plagues and you think Famine’s gonna get sloppy on his end? You think there are any more firstborns running around over in China right now?”

“You’re alive,” Sam says, coming over and sitting down a little too close for Dean’s peace of mind. “Dean, we—the ritual worked. We stopped Death.”

“Did we?” Dean responds. “I dunno, Sam. Seems to me like Croatoan’s still chugging along full speed. No reason to think we did jack all to Death’s game plan.”

“But—but Dean, you—”

Dean’s mouth twitches into a sickly grin as his chest gives a sharp twist. “You want to know something, dude? I think maybe they’re the lucky ones. Bobby, Ellen, Jo. Chuck. Maybe Death skipped a couple of us on purpose so Famine’d have a chance to dick us over. Spread the misery around a little.”

“You don’t mean that,” Sam whispers. There are tears in his eyes—unshed but threatening—and Dean really should quit while he’s ahead.

“What, that I wish I was dead? Like Hell I don—”

Sam punches him.

Dean’s teeth snap together on the word and he bites his tongue, spilling copper into his mouth. He doesn’t complain, though. Guesses he deserved that.

“You want to die so much, go ahead,” Sam snarls, pushing to his feet. There are tears spilling down his cheeks in a steady stream, but in true Winchester fashion he doesn’t sound anything but angry. “You’ve got a gun. Go ahead, load up and pull the trigger.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

Sam’s lower lip quibbles a little as he looks down at Dean, who feels like he’s been possessed. Christ, he doesn’t know what he’s saying right now. Doesn’t know what he’s doing, why he’s baiting Sam like this. Then he feels his gaze trying to slip lower—feels it trying to focus on Sam’s soft, soft mouth—and thinks that maybe he does know after all.

“Fuck you, Dean,” Sam bites out, and then turns tail _(no other word for it, really)_ and runs to the far side of the church. He takes his sleeping bag with him, bedding down on the other side of the pews where Dean can’t see him and leaving Dean alone with what was supposed to be their dinner. The food didn’t look all that appetizing before, but now Dean’s stomach curls in on itself when he looks at it.

 _Aw, fuck it,_ he thinks, and starts shoving everything into the plastic bag that serves as their garbage. His hands are shaking as he takes the bag out front and chucks it into the snow—from the cold, he tells himself. It’s just the cold.

Dean can’t sleep. He tries, but the church keeps popping around him, and he’s fucking freezing, and he keeps seeing Sam’s face. Sam looking at Dean like Dean just put a bullet in his chest.

It’s not Sam’s fault Dean’s fucked up.

Finally, with a frustrated grumble, he thrashes his way out of the sleeping bag and gets up. It’s even colder out in the open air, and he swears as he gets hold of the bag and heads over to the other row of pews. In the shadows at the end of the aisle, up by the altar, something moves: Sam’s head coming up as Dean approaches. He’s feigning sleep again by the time Dean gets there, though, so Dean nudges him in the side with a foot.

“Move over.”

“What part of me telling you to fuck off did you not get?” Sam mumbles.

“You’re just as cold as I am, dude, now move over.”

Sam might as well be a statue.

“Fine,” Dean says, tossing his sleeping bag down on top of his brother.

It isn’t until he actually sits on Sam’s stomach that Sam finally flails to life, though: shoving him away and yelling, “What the hell is _wrong_ with you, Dean?”

It’s late, and Dean’s cold, and this isn’t fucking easy for him, thanks, and it’s instinct to yell back, “In case you haven’t noticed, Sam, I’m having a pretty shitty year.”

“And I’m not?”

“I don’t know what you’re so pissed about,” Dean continues, abandoning what was clearly a losing argument. “I’d think you’d be thrilled to finally have me out of your hair.”

Sam’s silent for a long moment, and Dean kind of wishes he could see well enough to make out his brother’s expression. Then Sam says, “I can’t figure out if you’re an asshole or a moron.”

Both, Dean guesses.

“Whatever, princess. Now move over already: I’m fucking cold.”

For a moment, Dean thinks Sam’s going to refuse again and he’s actually going to have to apologize, which he really isn’t looking forward to. Then, with grudging slowness, Sam moves. Dean spreads his bag out and crawls in, inching back toward Sam until their backs are touching through the layers of nylon and insulation. His stomach gives a tight, nervous flutter which he ignores in favor of mooching off his brother’s body heat.

And then Sam rolls over as well, and Dean goes stiff as he feels his brother’s breath huff out against the nape of his neck. Back-to-back for heat conservation is one thing. This is a little too close to spooning for Dean’s comfort.

“I’m right behind you, Dean,” Sam says.

 _Well, duh,_ Dean thinks, shifting uncomfortably.

Then Sam adds, “And the next time you start talking shit about wishing you were dead, you’d better remember that.”

Oh. Dean swallows thickly, not sure if he feels comforted or alarmed by that assertion. After a moment, he says, “You’re assuming I care.”

But instead of getting angry or defensive, Sam laughs quietly. “Yeah, you sold your soul because you don’t give a shit whether I’m alive or dead.”

“Yeah, well, that was before you kissed me.”

It’s Sam’s turn to stiffen, and Dean gives himself a mental kick—Christ, you’d think he’d had enough of sabotaging himself by now. But the words are already out, and he can’t take them back.

“I thought we were okay with that,” Sam says eventually. “I thought it was ‘just stress’.”

“Guess you thought wrong.”

 _Oh, fucking Christ, Winchester. Shut. Up._

Except Dean’s pretty sure that the shit coming out of his mouth is the only thing keeping him from climbing out of his own sleeping bag and into Sam’s. He thinks he can hear Alistair laughing in Sam’s voice. He thinks he can feel Alistair touching him with Sam’s hands.

“I won’t,” Sam says, sounding awkward and unsure of himself. Dean winces into the darkness, shutting his eyes. “Dean, I don’t know how to take it back, but you don’t have to worry about me doing it again, okay? If that’s ... if that’s why you’ve been so ...”

“So what?”

“I don’t know. Hostile?”

“We’re in the middle of an apocalypse, Sam. I think I’m entitled to be a little moody. But no, your big gay crisis isn’t helping any, thanks for asking.”

Sam is silent behind him, and Dean’s struck with the unpleasant certainty that the reason Sam isn’t talking is because he’s crying. Dean made his little brother cry—again—and Sam’s probably back there biting his lower lip bloody to keep Dean from hearing it. Worse, Dean can feel more of the same, terrified bile trying to get out past his lips.

“Night,” he chokes out instead, walling off the conversation before he can damage his relationship with Sam beyond repair.

“Night,” Sam answers—voice dry, so he wasn’t crying after all, although the way he turns over and shifts a couple of inches away leaves Dean aching deep inside anyway.

“Dean.”

“Mmph.”

“ _Dean._ ”

Dean blinks back to awareness this time, lifting his head and trying to make sense of his surroundings.

It doesn’t take long to realize that he’s wrapped around Sam like a boa constrictor, much as he can be with two sleeping bags between them. And he’s hard.

Oh fuck.

“Sorry,” he blurts, trying to thrash to his feet. Of course, his legs get caught in the sleeping bag, which means that he falls back over before he can get his knees under him. Finally, after almost a minute of flailing, he remembers how to unzip the bag. Cold air floods in, making him shiver and swear as he gets up.

Sam’s leaning on his elbows when Dean chances a look, head tilted up so that he can watch Dean. There’s nothing resembling a decipherable expression on his face, which means that Dean has no clue if Sam gets that Dean’s sporting a pretty painful erection.

He sincerely hopes the answer to that question is not.

“Gotta piss,” he mumbles finally, turning away.

He doesn’t run outside, but it’s a very near thing.

A little over a week after the unpleasantness in the church, they’re moving through another city again. They’ve been through towns before, but nothing this size and nothing with such obvious signs of having played host to a Croatoan infection. But there’s blood everywhere, and the skeletal twist of bodies beneath the thin layer of snow, and that word spray-painted over the sides of buildings again and again, like the insane refrain of a dirge.

They move through the silence cautiously, guns out and necks craning for signs of danger, even though the snow clearly hasn’t been disturbed at all. It’s a pretty good indication that the Croats have moved on, but Dean doesn’t want to take chances, and they haven’t been there ten minutes before he’s cocking off the safety on his gun to cut down on his reaction time. Sam’s not feeling any more comfortable beside him, Dean can tell—he’s twitchy and keeps shrugging at the backpack, like he’s thinking of ditching it.

Dean’s considering suggesting just that—they can restock somewhere up the road—when there’s an earsplitting cry from somewhere up ahead. His hand jerks on the gun, setting it off and sending a bullet into a nearby wall with a puff of powder, and Sam swears beside him.

But a few seconds have passed now, and Dean gets that it wasn’t the enraged shout of the infected. No, that was someone in pain. Someone who needs help.

Dean’s struggling out of his backpack before he gets further in his thought process.

“Dean,” Sam says from beside him. “Hang on a sec. We don’t know—”

But then the backpack falls away and Dean is sprinting forward, leaving Sam behind.

It isn’t difficult to follow the screams, even in this echoing graveyard, and Dean isn’t even out of breath when he skids into a side street and sees two people hunched close together by the side of a building. Both of the people have their backs to him, kneeling down close to the ground, and Dean keeps a tight grip on his gun as he starts forward.

Just in case.

“Hey!” he calls, and the people jerk upright with startled shouts.

Dean was wrong in his initial assessment. There are actually three people over there: one down and screaming on the ground where he couldn’t see her, and then a tall man and a ... Christ, a kid. Not more than fourteen years old, if that.

Fourteen or not, the kid’s carrying a rifle, and he brings it up as Dean approaches.

“Woah!” Dean says, snapping on the safety on his own piece and holding the gun up so that it’s dangling from one finger. “I’m not infected, okay? I just want to help.”

“Throw the gun away.” That’s the man, who is now pointing yet another weapon in Dean’s direction. And the kid might not know how to use his _(or he might: world’s pretty fucked up these days)_ , but this dude definitely does.

Dean tosses his own gun to the side without a second thought. He can hear Sam yelling his name behind him—getting closer as he follows Dean’s tracks—and holds both hands out in entreaty.

“That’s my brother you’re hearing,” he announces. “We’re just passing through. I heard the lady yell and thought maybe I could help.”

“You a doctor?” the man wants to know. He’s speaking reasonably enough, but the gun’s still up, which Dean doesn’t like. Not when there’s that much strain in the man’s voice, reasonable words or not.

“No,” Dean admits, keeping his own voice gentle and trying to project trustworthiness. It’s difficult to do when every instinct in his body is yelling at him to get over to the screaming woman and help already. “But I’m a pretty good field medic.”

“You ex-military?” the man asks, voice sharpening.

Dean hesitates for a moment and then takes a calculated risk that that it’s hope he hears in the man’s voice instead of hostility, and lies, “Marines.”

It’s the right choice.

The man lowers his weapon first, then rests a hand on the kid’s shoulder in clear command. As soon as Dean’s sure he isn’t going to get shot full of lead for moving, he hurries forward again, careful to keep his hands in plain sight.

Now that he’s closer, he can see the blood seeping through the woman’s jeans. She’s grabbing the wound, and still shrieking, and fucking hell, is that some kind of _javelin_ sticking through her thigh?

“What happened?” Dean asks as he skids to a stop and kneels down next to her. Not a javelin at all, he sees now, but a fire poker. Sharpened at one end and covered with blasting power at the other.

“There was some kind of trap,” the man reports. “One minute, Marge was walking right next to me, and then there was an explosion and she just. She fell down and started screaming. I don’t know what to do. Please. Please, you gotta help her.”

“Dean!” that’s Sam’s voice, calling out some kind of command that Dean could decipher if he his attention weren’t otherwise occupied.

Instead, he gets hold of the woman’s wrists and pulls them away from her leg. She lets out a shriek and twists them in his grasp, trying to grab onto the wound again.

“Lady,” he says, speaking loudly and clearly in an attempt to reach her through the pain. “I need to see, okay? I’ve got to see what I’m dealing with if I’m going to help you.”

“Dean, no!”

It isn’t Sam’s repeated yells that make Dean pause so much as the sound of guns being cocked far too close to his head for comfort. When he glances up, he finds the man and the boy sighting at something again—not him this time, but Sam.

“Sam, put the gun down!” he yells. Doesn’t have to look back to know that’s what’s spooking the natives.

“Get away from her, damn it!” Sam shouts back, and now Dean can’t help glancing back incredulously at his brother.

“Dude!” he calls. “She’s hurt! Now drop the goddamn gun and get the hell over here and help me.”

But Sam doesn’t move. And he doesn’t lower his own gun, which is pointed not at the man or the boy but at the woman screaming on the ground. His eyes are wide: his body stiff with tension. “She could be infected!”

Dean’s gut goes cold at his brother’s words. If she is, it wouldn’t take more than a heartbeat for her to get him. Fingernails scraping over his cheek, teeth digging into his wrist. Hell, if he has an open abrasion on his hand while he’s fixing her up, he’s fucked without her having to even move a muscle.

“She’s not,” the kid says, taking his eyes off Sam to cast a pleading look at Dean.

Dean can tell that the kid believes the words, but fuck, Dean’s really not sure himself. Because if this trap the man mentioned was set by Croats, the piece of metal sticking out of the woman’s leg was almost certainly coated in infected blood. And there’s no telling how long the shelf life on the fucking virus is.

Not that it changes anything. Dean just doesn’t have it in him to turn his back on her now that he’s here.

He opens his mouth to say as much and then shuts it again as he finds himself blinking down the barrel of the man’s gun. The business end of the metal brushes against his temple in warning, making it difficult to look past the threat to the man at the other end, but somehow Dean manages.

The guy’s sweating despite the cold. His eyes are wide and filled with a frantic fear Dean recognizes from his own past, when it was Sam bleeding out. When it was Sam’s life on the line and Dean wouldn’t have hesitated to carve up anyone he needed to in order to help his little brother.

“You’re helping her,” the man says.

“Drop the gun!” That’s Sam again, sounding more than a little on edge, and fuck, it’s looking more and more like Dean’s going to end up painting the sidewalk with his brains.

“Damn it, Sam!” he barks. “Let me fucking handle this!” He doesn’t take his eyes off the man standing over him—doesn’t dare to break the connection. But he knows Sam is listening to him from the way no one’s firing at anyone else.

“Help her,” the man repeats, hand shaking in a way that’s really alarming when he has his finger on the trigger. “ _Now._ ”

“I will,” Dean says, keeping his voice as even and calm as he can manage. “But you gotta step back and let me work, okay? Cause I gotta tell you, buddy, the gun’s making me nervous. And you do not want me nervous right now.”

Slowly, making sure the motion can’t be mistaken for an attack, he lifts his own hands. The tremors shaking his fingers are more from the cold than anything else, but Dean’s not above using them to get the gun out of his face so he can concentrate on what he’s doing without worrying about having his skull perforated.

Plus, he doesn’t trust Sam not to do something batshit stupid if this dude doesn’t stop threatening him within the next thirty seconds or so.

The man looks at him for a long moment, clearly trying to weigh his intentions. Then, finally, with a nervous twitch of his cheek, he lets his arm fall back down to his side.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I’m sorry, I just. She’s my wife.”

“This your boy?” Dean checks, still not moving.

“Yeah.”

No hesitation there, but Dean sincerely doubts that the guy’s telling the truth—the odds of a family being left untouched and whole by this clusterfuck of an apocalypse is staggeringly small. His eyes dart to the man’s hands—no gold or silver band on his ring finger—and yeah, Dean’s getting lied to. But he guesses it doesn’t much matter what these three were to each other before the end.

They’re family now.

“What’s your name?”

“Ryan,” the man answers. His voice is steadier now: all the questions helping to walk him back from the brink of collapse—or maybe that’s the confident, competent air Dean’s projecting. “This is Dillan, and my wife’s Marge.”

“Okay, Ryan. I’m gonna check Marge out, and then we’ll figure out what to do, alright?”

Ryan swallows thickly and nods.

Three hours later, Marge is unconscious—has been for a while now—but her pulse is steady, and Dean’s gotten the bleeding stopped and her leg stitched up. If she can manage to keep it from getting infected, she’ll pull through with no worse than a slight limp. Dean ties off the last bit of the thread he used to stitch her closed and then uses his knife to cut the extra bit away.

“Okay,” he announces. “I’m done.”

Ryan’s head comes up from where he’s sitting with Marge’s head pillowed in his lap. “Is she ...”

“She’ll be fine,” Dean answers, pushing to his feet. His knees pop—partly from having been stuck kneeling for so long, partly from the cold—and he grimaces. “Just keep her warm and the wound clean. You should probably put some kind of antibacterial cream on it.”

“I—” Ryan starts, and then chokes up. He closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them again as the tears slip out anyway. “Thank you.”

Crap, Dean hates this. He hates being thanked for fixing something that’s his fault in the first place. Ducking his head, he starts to rub the back of his neck before remembering that his hands are covered in blood.

“No problem,” he mumbles finally. “I wasn’t just going to leave her, y’know?”

“Some would have,” Ryan responds, eyes slipping past Dean.

Dean glances back reflexively, following the look, and finds himself meeting his brother’s eyes. Sam, who still hasn’t put his own gun down, and who is watching Ryan like he’s just waiting for a chance to use it. The kid—Dillan—hasn’t put down the rifle either, but Dean can’t blame him, with Sam setting such a wonderful example and all.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Dean says as he turns back. “My brother can be kind of a dick.”

“We’re not infected,” Ryan announces, watching Dean now but stroking his hand absently through Marge’s hair.

“I know.”

Ryan nods, glancing down at his wife’s unconscious form for a moment, and then looks back up at Dean and says. “You’re welcome to stay with us, if you want, but I—I can’t have him near us. I’m sorry, but I have to. I have to think of my family.”

Dean thinks of saying that Sam’s not infected either—that he’ll grow on Ryan, that he’s all bark and no bite—and doesn’t. The funny thing is, if Ryan knew them Before, he would’ve been asking Sam to stay and Dean to take a hike. If Ryan knew what Dean has done—if he knew that Dean pulled that fire poker from his wife’s leg so easily because he’s had extensive experience with fire pokers, and skinning knives, and needles—he’d shove his gun back in Dean’s face and tell him to get the fuck away.

Dean doesn’t belong with these people. He isn’t sure he belongs anywhere anymore, except with his pain in the ass little brother.

“Gonna have to decline,” he says, and slips his knife back into his boot. “But thanks for the offer.”

Sam’s pissed.

Dean knows because Sam hasn’t said anything to him for the past three days, which is making their sleeping arrangement really awkward. Lying so close to someone who’s thinking of ways to maim you isn’t conducive to a restful night’s sleep, but it’s too cold to move all that far away, even with a fire. The one night Dean tries it anyway, Sam follows him—picking up his own sleeping bag and dropping it even closer to Dean’s than normal. And that’s the end of that attempt.

But Dean’s getting really tired of Sam’s attitude when he knows he didn’t do anything wrong _(not this time, anyway)_ , and finally, when Sam slips on a patch of ice and Dean reaches out to catch him, only to have his help shrugged violently away, Dean loses it.

“Okay, spill. What bug crawled up your ass and died?”

Sam’s jaw clenches and he walks faster.

“Sam. Hey! I’m talking to you, asshole.”

Only he might as well not be there for all the attention Sam’s paying him.

Okay, that’s it. Jogging forward the few steps he needs to catch up with his brother, he grabs Sam’s arm and jerks him around ... and finds himself shoved backwards. He pinwheels his arms as the weight of his backpack threatens to send him over, but Sam has hold of his arms and is keeping him upright. Which doesn’t mean Dean’s any less off balance as Sam forces him quickly backwards, boots crunching through the snow, until Dean collides heavily with the rusted skeleton of someone’s pickup.

Sam still isn’t saying anything, but he’s looking at Dean for the first time in days, and that .... that’s actually not an improvement. Because Sam’s eyes are wild and verging on unhinged. His nostrils are flaring as he sucks in shallow breaths, gripping Dean’s arms hard enough to leave bruises.

“Get off me,” Dean tries, getting his hands up between them in an effort to shove his brother back.

Before he can manage it, Sam closes the little space left between them. Dropping Dean’s left arm, Sam gets his forearm up against Dean’s throat and presses, bending him backward.

“Fucker,” Dean spits. He gropes for the pressure point on Sam’s shoulder, but it’s difficult to feel anything through all the bundled layers.

“Don’t move.” It’s less a request than an order: less an order than a growl.

Dean guesses he should be freaked out by his brother’s behavior, but the sad truth is that he’s seen worse. Besides, if things get dicey, he can always stick his thumb in Sam’s eye. That’d make pretty much anyone back off.

“Get the fuck off, Sam,” he repeats more strongly, still struggling.

Sam does—for all of a second—and then knocks Dean’s head backwards into the side of the pick-up’s cab. The world fades in a burst of pain, and when it comes back online, Sam has him by the throat again. Somewhere in the intervening time, he took advantage of Dean’s disorientation and ditched his backpack, which puts Dean at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to maneuverability and speed.

“I said don’t move,” Sam growls.

“What the fuck, man?” Dean demands. He’s still less frightened than he is bewildered by his brother’s unexpected vehemence.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

The stupidity of that statement jolts Dean right out of his confusion and into anger. “You don’t—you just bounced my fucking _skull_ off the truck, Sam! I think we’re past you not hurting me.”

Sam’s throat works as his fingers clench around Dean’s neck. “You’re lucky that’s all I did.”

“ _You’re_ gonna be lucky if I don’t shoot your ass,” Dean spits. “Christ, man, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

Sam’s gaze sharpens—Dean didn’t think that was possible—and he says, in a soft, dangerous voice, “You want to know what’s wrong with me? You, Dean. You and your motherfucking death wish.”

Dean blinks, caught off guard by Sam’s unexpected accusation. “My what?”

“Don’t even try to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“No, I—what I said in the church, I was just. Dude, I was just.” Dean can’t finish that statement. He just can’t get “I was trying to push you away because I was freaking out about maybe-possibly-definitely thinking too much about you kissing me” past his lips.

“Yeah,” Sam says with a bitter twist to his mouth. “I figured you were just being a dick. But then you just—Jesus Christ, Dean, she could’ve been infected. She could’ve. And you didn’t even fucking hesitate.”

And Dean really should have seen this conversation coming. “Dude, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead, okay?”

“Bullshit.”

Dean can’t say anything to refute that. Because yeah, he didn’t even consider it at first, but he was definitely acknowledging the possibility when he got his hands coated in her blood.

“Yeah, well, nothing happened. I’m fine.”

“This time,” Sam says. “What about the next time you decide to play Good Samaritan and it turns out to be a trap? Huh? What about then?”

“Then we’ll deal with it, okay?”

But it isn’t okay: Dean can tell from the moisture leaking from Sam’s eyes and spilling down his cheeks.

“You can’t do that to me, Dean,” Sam says. “You can’t leave me.”

He moves then, just like he did the last time those words left his mouth, but this time Dean sees it coming from a mile away. Sam’s expression is desperate—pleading—and Dean’s chest wrenches at the depth of loneliness and need he sees there, but he can’t do this. He can’t do this to Sam.

World might have ended—no one left to point fingers or condemn them—but that doesn’t make this right. Doesn’t mean Sam deserves someone as fucked up as Dean.

Panic rises in his throat, hot and thick, and gives him the strength to shove Sam away before their mouths can actually connect. He pushes himself away from the car as soon as he has room to do so, sliding out of his backpack as quickly as he can and letting it drop into the snow. Unburdened, he jogs out from between Sam and the truck and puts some distance between them.

Dean’s moving quickly, but he might as well not have bothered because Sam isn’t pursuing. He’s standing where Dean pushed him, body shaking while he runs his hands through his hair and stares blankly down at the kicked up snow.

It takes Sam almost ten minutes to calm down, and then he retrieves his pack without looking at Dean. Dean watches his brother struggle back into the straps, standing on the far side of the road with his arms crossed protectively in front of his body. He waits until Sam’s almost out of sight down the road before moving himself, picking up his backpack and trailing along in the wake of his brother’s footsteps.


	3. Chapter 3

For the first time since that nameless town where Dean buried the Impala, they spend the night apart. Not just in separate rooms this time, but separate houses. Dean isn’t sure which of them is giving the other space, but he knows that he doesn’t sleep well—and not just because he’s cold as fuck-all without the furnace of Sam’s body helping to keep him warm. He keeps thinking about Sam’s eyes—how fucking wrecked Sam looked when he came about a centimeter from kissing Dean at the side of the road.

He keeps thinking about how close Sam seemed to losing it, and how he hasn’t really taken the time to consider how his brother feels about all this end of the world crap. He hasn’t been able to see past his own pain and guilt to notice that Sam’s hanging on by the edge of his fingertips.

Probably the kissing thing should have tipped him off. Would have, if there weren’t a part of him that’s been waiting for just as much ever since he got back topside.

He meets Sam in the morning, on the porch of the house Sam picked for himself. Sam draws up short when he opens the door and finds Dean sitting there, but he doesn’t hesitate for more than a second before joining him on the steps. They sit there for a while, staring out at the frozen neighborhood—no snow here, at least, although it’s cold enough for it.

Finally, Dean says, “I think my left nut turned into a block of ice last night.”

Sam makes a strangled sound that’s almost a laugh, and Dean looks studiously down at his feet as he scrapes his boot across the frost coating the bottom step.

“So, I think maybe in the interest of me having sex again ever, we should talk about this.”

There’s a beat of silence and then Sam says, “’This’ being ...”

“I’m not suicidal.” It sounds funny out loud, but Dean’s finally figured out that Sam needs to hear it. “Maybe I—things were a little fucked for a while there, after Bobby and Jo and Ellen, and I—when we were talking about the ritual, I never thought about what it’d do to Cas, and that sort of fucked with my mind too, but I never actually considered offing myself. It’s a real pussy thing to do, you know?”

Sam sits next to him and doesn’t say anything.

“Cas was there,” Dean adds. “Right at the end, he—I heard his voice, and he was so goddamned scared. I didn’t—I had nightmares about that, first month or so. And I still wish I could have told him—”

“Shut up.” The words are colorless—no sign of Sam’s earlier thawing—and Dean glances over in surprise to find his brother’s hands clenched into fists on top of his thighs.

“Wha—”

“I don’t want to hear his name.”

“Who? Wait, you mean Cas?” Christ, Dean needs a fucking roadmap for Sam’s moods.

His brother gets up at that, movements sharp, and heads back into the house. After a few moments, Dean gets up and follows him.

“Hey, Mr. Hyde,” he calls after Sam’s broad back as he goes. “You haven’t seen my brother around, have you? Tall guy, shaggy hair, answers to the name of Sam?”

“It’s not funny, Dean,” Sam snaps, pacing in a tight line.

Dean can see that it isn’t—Sam’s oozing violence into the room, moving back and forth like a caged wolf—but he doesn’t know what’s going on here, and he’s too off balance to do anything but fall back on humor.

“You know, I hear sex does wonders for PMS, Sammy. You should try it sometime.”

That gets him Sam’s full attention, Sam’s spine snapping straight and his head jerking around. The look in Sam’s eyes does strange, not entirely unpleasant things to Dean’s stomach and he backs up a step before catching himself.

“Did you?” Sam asks, moving toward him with deliberate, slow steps.

“Did I what?” Dean replies. He tries to head back out the door where he has room to maneuver, but Sam’s there first, herding him away and back onto the living room rug.

“Did you try it with him?”

For a moment, Dean can’t work that question through the disconnect and then, with a jolt, it comes clear. He stops moving, dazed by comprehension, and says, “You’re asking if I fucked Cas.”

Sam’s jaw clenches and the muscles in his neck cord. “Did you?”

Absurd amusement and anger war in Dean’s chest. On the one hand, the thought of Cas getting past second base with anyone is really fucking hilarious. On the other, he can’t quite believe that Sam thinks so little of him. And of Cas, come to think of it.

“Actually,” he hears himself say. “Cas fucked me. A bunch of times. And I loved it. You know why, Sam? Cause he wasn’t my _brother_.”

That should shove Sam right down off the high horse he’s straddling.

Except instead Sam makes some wild, hoarse noise in the back of his throat and lunges forward. Dean tries to dodge, but he wasn’t really expecting Sam to try anything physical _(Sam was supposed to deflate when Dean threw that at him)_ and he’s a little too slow to make it. Sam crashes into him, sending Dean backwards onto the couch.

Dean’s squirms off the arm _(his back’s going to be carrying that impression for a week)_ and onto the seat cushions. It’s a more comfortable position, but the couch is way too squishy for him to have any leverage when Sam follows, dropping on top of him and pawing between their bodies at Dean’s buckle.

“Stop,” Dean spits, shoving at Sam’s chest. “Sam. Fucking. Christ, get off me!”

All of the pounding is doing absolutely nothing to Sam’s determination, though, so Dean switches gears and goes for his brother’s eyes instead. Sam isn’t going to feel all that frisky if Dean sticks his thumb in one of his sockets. Except Sam’s expecting Dean to play dirty _(of course he is)_ and ducks his head, hiding his face against Dean’s chest as he finishes opening Dean’s buckle and starts in on his pants.

“Goddamn it,” Dean swears, kicking one leg sideways and planting his foot on the floor for leverage. The new spread of his legs drops Sam down against him more firmly, though, and this isn’t—this can’t be fucking happening. Not here. Not for real.

“Sam!” he chokes out, punching his brother’s shoulder as hard as he can from such an awkward angle. “No. Fuck you, I said no!”

Then his jeans are open and Sam’s hand is inside and grabbing Dean’s cock. Dean goes still, chest twisting with guilt and shame and stomach trembling with something a lot more eager. Sam stills on top of him as well, both of them breathing in shallow, hoarse pants as they lie there.

“It’s not what you think,” Dean says finally, shame and disgust twisting in his chest.

Sam lifts his head at that, and his expression is closed and unreadable as he looks up at Dean’s face. “Really?” he says, “Because it feels a lot like you’re getting off on this.”

“Cause there’s a hand on my dick,” Dean shoots back. “And if you let go right now and get the hell off me, I might let you live.”

Sam just looks at him steadily for a long moment before saying, “Turn over.”

“What?” Dean’s heart kicks in his chest. “Fuck you, no.”

One corner of Sam’s mouth twists up and Dean has time to think _oh cra—_ before his brother is jacking him with slow, firm drags of his hand. Biting his lip, he pushes his head back into the cushion of the couch. His thighs tense and his outstretched leg gives a weak kick.

A moment later, there’s something wet on his throat—Sam’s tongue. Sam licking him in a long line, up his throat and over his jaw and toward his ear. Dean shudders and turns his face away, straining not to move his hips with his brother’s strokes the way he wants to. Sam is panting into his ear now, moist and heavy. Just hovering there breathing while he keeps working Dean’s cock.

“Sam,” Dean manages. It still sounds more like a warning than a plea, but not by much.

“Turn over, Dean,” Sam repeats, slipping the words into Dean’s ear like it’ll make Dean more willing to obey instead of run for the door.

And Dean, in a flash of clarity, gets that he’s pushed Sam too far for reason to work. Or maybe it’s the world that’s doing that: being trapped in a decaying shell would drive anyone a little nuts. Either way, if he’s going to get out of this without fucking things up between them completely, he’s going to need to use more devious tactics.

“Okay,” he rasps. “Okay, just. Gimme some room.”

Miracle of miracles, Sam lets go. Then he actually pushes up onto his hands and knees, letting in a rush of air that’s so cold it’s almost painful. He’s moving cautiously, though, eyes fixed on Dean for any signs of escape, which means that Dean has to time this perfectly. He moves slowly, turning on his side and then getting a hand flat on the couch cushion in preparation of his next move.

Sam’s eyes are traveling over his body, covetous and hungry as though Dean is naked instead of covered in enough layers that he might as well be the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Dean watches his brother back, and as soon as Sam seems distracted enough he moves, pushing off the cushion. He doesn’t roll off the side the way he can tell Sam’s expecting him to, but instead scrambles up and over the arm. Or he plans to, anyway, except he hasn’t gone more than a couple inches when Sam’s weight drops back down on top of him, trapping him with one shoulder propped up on the couch arm and his hand twisted beneath him.

“No,” he spits, rolling his hips and trying to buck Sam off of him. The movement does nothing to dislodge Sam, though, and everything to work his open jeans lower down on his own body. At the first brush of Sam’s vinyl overcoat against his bare ass, Dean panics, losing all sight of strategy and just thrashing in a desperate play for freedom.

Jesus Christ, this isn’t happening.

Then Sam’s hand palms the back of his skull, squishing Dean’s face against the side of the couch arm. His other hand grabs hold of Dean’s jeans and yanks them even lower, making Dean suck in a sharp breath and jerk his hips to the side in futile protest.

“You want it,” Sam pants. “You fucking— _you want this_ , Dean.”

Dean tosses his head, trying to get Sam’s hand off, but it’s a weak attempt because he knows Sam’s right. He’s harder than he’s ever been, and his body is trembling with how much he wants to spread and let Sam do whatever he wants.

Except that’s not going to solve any of their problems. It’s only going to make things worse, because if sex complicates things, then sex between brothers ties them into half a dozen Gordian knots. And fuck, Sam’s already enough of a mess over Dean. He doesn’t need incest added to his plate.

But Dean’s dreamed of this—sick or not, he’s spent nights gagging over how much he wished Sam would do this to him—and when he opens his mouth to tell Sam he’ll never forgive him if he doesn’t stop right fucking _now_ , what comes out is, “Come on, Sammy. That all you got?”

The pressure on his skull lessens immediately as Sam sits up. Dean has enough room to move now, but he isn’t trying to go anywhere. He’s lying on his stomach on the couch and squeezing his eyes shut while the clink and zip of Sam taking out his cock comes from behind him. Then Sam’s body drops back down, blanketing him in warmth, and something stiff and blunt pushes between the tight crease of Dean’s thighs. Dean tries to spread for it, give Sam some room to rut, but it’s an impossible task with his jeans around his knees the way they are.

“Fuck,” Sam curses, and a moment later he’s pulling his cock back out and adjusting—moving up so that it’s the crack of Dean’s ass he’s thrusting along. It’s dry for the first few passes—chafing—but then things get a little slicker as Sam’s precome smears along Dean’s skin, and pretty soon Sam is sliding easily between his cheeks.

Dean pushes back into the friction, maneuvering his trapped arm down far enough to get a hand around his own cock and start fisting it. He keeps his eyes closed—shut up, if he can’t see it, then it doesn’t count—and his mouth clenched on all the filthy, encouraging things he wants to say.

Or maybe it’s the sharp twists of hunger that hit him with every nudge that Sam’s cock makes against his pucker that he’s fighting to swallow.

It’s over quickly. Sam spills first, semen slicking Dean’s ass and getting between his thighs, and the messy, wet sensation—at once so familiar and so new—is what puts Dean over. He bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to draw blood as he pumps his own release out against the couch cushions and then sags. He can feel the sobs caught in his chest trying to come out, warring with the pleasurable aftershocks as he eases his hand away from his spent cock.

Behind him, Sam mouths messily at the nape of Dean’s neck a few times and then goes still.

Dean has no clue what’s going through his brother’s mind. Hell, he wishes that someone would give him a hint as to what his own thoughts on the matter are.

He can’t believe that just happened.

Finally, after several long minutes of silence, Sam climbs off of him and gets up. Dean still doesn’t move, listening as his brother tucks himself away and zips up his pants. Silence falls again, broken only by the sound of his own breathing, and Dean knows Sam’s looking at him. He knows what he looks like, too, with come smeared on his ass and the back of his thighs. Alistair told him often enough.

“Dean,” Sam says, choking the word out past a blockage that sounds almost as large as the one in Dean’s throat.

“Just. Just give me a minute,” Dean says.

There’s a beat and then Sam says, “Do you need—”

“I need a motherfucking _minute_ , Sam.”

“I. Okay. Yeah, I’ll just. I’ll be outside, okay? Take as long as you want.”

Dean waits until he hears Sam close the door behind him. Then he waits some more. He waits until he can’t lie there anymore, until the cold has sunk into his skin and left him numb, and then slowly climbs to his feet and starts to put himself back together.

Sam’s waiting for him on the porch.

He jumps up immediately when Dean comes out, brow creased and hurt, puppy expression firmly in place. Dean can smell the apology coming and heads it off at the pass by saying, “So. If we double-time it, we should be able to make Rosewood by dark.”

For a moment, he thinks Sam’s going to say something anyway—he wants to; Dean can tell—but then his brother swallows and nods.

Dean strides down the steps and into the street and does his best not to think about anything at all.

There are Croats in Rosewood.

Sam catches wind of them first, grabbing Dean’s sleeve and pulling him up short. Dean’s first thought at the contact is of bodies moving together, and an impression of heat, and his groin warms with alarming speed. He’s hard before he comes to a stop: muscles tense and quaking with the impulse to pull Sam down on top of him and spread for it.

The strength of his response is terrifying—he’s already fucked enough over Sam, he gets that. He got that even when their relationship was fraying apart around them and he thought Sam hated him: thought Sam was as disgusted by and contemptuous of his weakness as Dean was.

He still isn’t sure Sam’s opinion of him is all that high, but over the past few months he’s finally figured out that Sam at least isn’t going anywhere. Sam needs him right back, and now that Dean has that it’s freaking him the fuck out. So is his own Pavlovian response to Sam manhandling him to a stop—Christ, he never used to get off on this kind of thing, but Sam’s hand is practically spanning his bicep and all Dean can think about his how it felt to have Sam on top of him, Sam forcing him to give in, to submit.

Hell did this to him. Hell twisted Dean up inside and left him craving a little direction, and fuck, he didn’t realize just how deep that particular impulse ran until now. He didn’t realize how much he missed those sessions with Alistair until Sam decided to offer them again—only this time for real. This time with Sam at the wheel, Sam driving groans from his throat as his cock spears Dean open with little prep and less slick.

Dean’s heart is jackrabbiting in his chest and his stomach is lurching with anxiety and nerves. He’s certain all of his dirtysickwrong thoughts are plain on his face and he jerks away from his brother’s touch. He can’t seem to get a breath, keeping his face averted and struggling to maintain an impassive expression. The knowledge that he’s failing miserably is bitter and sharp.

His eyes are too wide, he knows; his face flushed. He couldn’t be more obvious if he were holding up a neon sign saying, ‘My brother humped me on some dead dude’s couch and I really want him to actually fuck me next time’.

Stiff with the understanding that Sam must know what’s going through his head, Dean catches himself before he goes more than a single step and stands there, staring sightlessly out at the quiet neighborhood block around them. He stands there and waits for Sam to grab him again, waits for Sam to push him down and mount him right here in the middle of the street.

Instead, Sam says in a subdued voice, “Croats.”

That one word cuts cleanly through Dean’s confusion and brings his eyes over to his brother. Sam isn’t looking at him, head lowered and eyes fixed on the ground. Dean doesn’t know that he likes the expression on his brother’s face, but then again he hasn’t been thrilled with Sam’s attitude all day. For someone who had no problem pushing Dean into doing what they both wanted, Sam’s been awful shy since.

But they have more pressing concerns right now.

“Where?” he asks, voice low.

“Close.”

“How do you know?” Dean asks, scanning the streets for some sign of danger. And then he sees it. He sees it and his stomach turns over. “Never mind,” he says, before Sam says anything out loud and makes the moment worse. Dean’s not sure how he overlooked it before, except that he’s used to seeing this kind of thing.

Not so fresh, though. Not for a long time now.

They stand there quietly for a while, both staring at the evidence of infection ahead, and then Dean turns around and rolls his shoulders, adjusting the weight of the pack.

“Come on, we’ll go around.”

They leave the mutilated body where it is, twisting at the end of a rope beneath a light post in the breeze.

They can’t go far—not in the encroaching dark—and end up spending that night in a small home on the outskirts of town. Sometime around midnight the cries start up: the raging yells of the Croats and higher, thready noises of people dying. They aren’t bedded down yet—Dean’s too nervous about what’s about to happen between them to initiate the process, and Sam isn’t showing any signs of wanting to turn in either—and Dean moves toward the door instinctively.

This time, when Sam grabs him, Dean is too distracted to pull away.

“No,” Sam says, low and fervent.

“Dude, we have to—”

Sam’s hand tightens on his arm. “ _No._ ”

Now Dean does pull away, jerking his arm free and scowling. Not that Sam can make out his expression in the darkened room. “Those are _people_ out there, Sam. We have to—”

“Have to what? Join them? You really think we’d be able to do anything? You think this’d turn out any different from Terrence Hills?”

Dean presses his lips together, brought up short by the reminder. The screams are still filtering into the house, though—they’re crawling up his spine and burrowing into his stomach, bringing Hell that much closer in his mind—and after a few moments he says, “Doesn’t matter. We have to fucking _try_.”

He starts forward again, heading in the direction of the door, and doesn’t even see the fist that slams into his face and knocks him out.

Dean wakes up with sunlight filtering through the windows, pale and cold. His head is pounding and his cheek feels swollen and sore. The morning is quiet around him.

He pushes up onto his elbow, looking around, and finds Sam sitting in a chair across the room watching him. Sam doesn’t look like he’s slept at all, eyes hollow and face pale. He isn’t wearing nearly enough clothes and Dean realizes that’s because both sleeping bags and all of Sam’s outerwear is piled on top of him, keeping him warm.

“You son of a bitch,” he says softly.

Sam just looks at him steadily, eyes doomed but unashamed, and says, “You can’t expect me to let you kill yourself, Dean. I can’t. I won’t.”

Dean scowls and starts to thrash his way free from the sleeping bags and coats. Moving so violently hurts his head, but he’s too angry to care. And maybe, somewhere deep inside, a little relieved, which makes him feel guilty and even more miserable than before.

“They were already dead,” Sam adds, watching as Dean starts putting himself together for the day.

Dean knows that. He remembers Terrence Hill just as well as Sam. He remembers trying to hold one little girl’s insides together while carrying her at a sprint away from a mob of Croats. He remembers having to drop her when she suddenly twisted in his arms, face contorting into a snarl, and tried to rip his throat open with her teeth.

Croats infect their victims before they start to play, he knows that. He knows.

But he doesn’t have to like it.

They don’t talk for a couple of weeks.

They walk during the day—more carefully since passing by Rosewood—and hole up at night. They sleep close together, not quite touching but sharing body heat, and around them the world continues to decay.

It gets colder. It snows twice, light falls both times.

On a lonely stretch of road, a pack of stray dogs _(German shepherds, couple Labradors, some kind of spaniel)_ tries to run them to ground and Dean’s forced to shoot a couple before the others back off. He’s unaccountably bothered by the small bodies and pauses long enough to give them a proper salt and burn. The stiffness of his shoulders dares Sam to say something, but Sam doesn’t.

Sam might as well be mute these days.

In Fredricksville, Tennessee, while searching a local general store for food, the floor gives way under Dean’s feet. He manages to get a grip on the broken boards as he drops, lower body dangling into space while his hands scramble for purchase.

Sam is there before Dean thinks to yell for him, leaning over the pit and hauling Dean back up to safety. Dean crawls away from the hole in the floor, keeping one hand on his brother, and they end up sitting with their backs against a bank of cereal boxes, hands loosely wrapped in each other’s shirts.

It’s a moment—almost—and Dean senses that he could fix things. He could drop his own fears and the aching self-hatred that’s been dogging him ever since he said yes and picked up a knife. He could turn his head to the side a little and have what he wants: one small glimmer of light in a darkened world.

He could put out a hand and stop himself from falling.

But he doesn’t move. He just sits there until Sam finally shifts away.

His chest gives a miserable little pulse, but he guesses it’s better this way. Sam probably regrets what they did anyway. He sure as hell hasn’t shown any signs that he wants it again—hell, he barely looks at Dean these days, never mind touching him.

It’s the worst kind of break, what’s happening between them—feels like a return to the slow death of what Dean likes to think of as the Ruby Era. Sam isn’t sneaking away from him these days—not physically, anyway—but Dean thinks they actually talked more back then. Maybe neither one of them was telling the truth, but at least they were speaking. At least they could look each other in the eye.

Dean’s been living in a dead world for months, but he’s never felt so much a part of it before.

“If we find any more people, you should go with them.”

It’s the first time Sam has said anything in almost two days, and Dean’s surprised enough by the sound of his brother’s voice that it takes the actual words a few moments to penetrate.

Then he says, “Excuse me?”

Still staring into their evening fire, Sam squares his jaw and doesn’t respond.

Dean guesses he doesn’t need him to.

“Why wait?” he demands. His voice is unhappy and bitter, but he’s too worn out by the last few weeks to care. “You’re so anxious to get rid of me, I can leave tomorrow.”

That gets him Sam’s gaze—hurt and shocked, which is fucking ridiculous since he’s the one who suggested splitting up in the first place—but Sam drops his eyes again in the next moment, lowering his head enough for his hair to curtain his expression.

“I’m not leaving you out there alone. I’m sorry, Dean, but I can’t do that.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not letting you pass me off to a bunch of strangers either. You don’t want to be saddled with me anymore, that’s fine, but don’t expect—”

“Woah,” Sam says, lifting his head again. “Saddled? I never said—”

“Oh, give me a little credit, Sam. I know you think I’m dumber than a sack of rocks, but it doesn’t exactly take a high school diploma to read the writing on the wall here.”

Sam looks at him for a long moment and Dean, unused to so much scrutiny, shifts and scowls. Finally, his brother says, “You know what, Dean? If you really think that’s how I feel, then you really are a moron.”

“Yeah, well, right back at you, chump.”

Dean’s not exactly sure what he means by that, but it’s all he can think of to say. This conversation is too confusing for him to follow—especially when there’s a large, gaping hole in his chest where the realization that Sam wants out has taken root. Whatever else has been going on, Dean never guessed Sam wanted to leave again. And this is Sam leaving, no matter how his brother wants to phrase it.

Sam’s quiet for a beat and then he says, “I’m not good for you, Dean. I’m—there’s something wrong with me. This isn’t about you, okay? It was never about you.”

And if Dean believes that one, he guesses there’s a bridge in Brooklyn with his name on it.

“Sure, Sam,” he says.

“We should be in Atlanta in a few weeks. There’re bound to be survivors there.”

“I said okay,” Dean grunts, and thank God Sam shuts up.

Dean makes himself sit there for a few minutes—doesn’t want to make it too obvious to Sam that he just managed to rip Dean’s insides open—and then can’t take it any more. He stands, keeping his eyes averted, and announces, “I’m turning in. Feel free not to join me.”

Sam, obliging asshole that he is, doesn’t.

Two days later, it snows for real.

The air is bitter and biting and the storm comes out of a seemingly clear sky. One moment the sun is shining, the next there’s white choking the air, and wind howling past.

Dean’s sure he isn’t going to have to worry about Atlanta anymore.

Then Sam yells, “This way!” and grabs Dean by the arm. Dean’s too preoccupied with surviving to fight his brother’s pull as Sam leads him forward through the storm.

The shadow looms up in front of them unexpectedly, hulking and broad, and Dean flinches back before he realizes that it’s a building—one Sam must have caught sight of before the storm hit. He feels around the outside with Sam until they locate a door and then helps his brother break it open.

The lock cracks on the third hit, spilling them into what turns out to be a gas station convenience store. The store is small, filled with chips and darkened refrigerators, and dimly illuminated by the white glow outside the large picture window.

Dean stumbles inside, closely followed by Sam, and then they both put their shoulders to the door and shove it shut again. It won’t stay closed on its own, of course—not after their abrupt entrance—and Dean ends up using his pack as a doorstop.

They stand in near silence for a while, listening to the wind howling outside and watching the storm. Then Dean says, “At least we have plenty of food.”

Sam doesn’t look amused with the comment, which Dean pretty much expected. His brother’s too busy looking around the store to respond, really—poking behind the counter and opening the bathroom door as though he’s looking for something. Which it turns out he is.

“We’re not going to be able to keep a fire going,” he says when he comes back out.

Dean’s eyes widen at the statement and he looks around himself, assessing the situation again. They’ve needed a fire every night lately, even with their sleeping bags so close together, and it’s cold as a freezer in here already. It’ll get worse when the sun sets, and the boxes of crackers are going to make pretty shitty kindling.

“Crap,” he says.

“Yeah.”

They make room in the middle of the floor for a fire anyway, shoving the shelving aside and breaking what they can apart to make kindling. Too bad most of the shelves are metal instead of wood.

By the time they have their fire pile finished, the light outside is already dimming and the storm is just beginning to pick up speed. The fire is pitifully small, and feels almost heatless when they get it going, as though the storm outside is devouring the warmth as quickly as it forms.

“I never thought I’d say this,” Dean mutters as he huddles as close to it as he can. “But I miss Hell. At least it was always warm there.”

“It’s only going to get colder.”

“And thanks so much for reminding me.”

Sam is silent for a moment, staring into their pitiful fire, and then, with marked reluctance, he says, “We might have to sleep together tonight.”

Dean lifts one eyebrow. “This is different from normal how?”

Still not meeting Dean’s eyes, Sam shakes his head. “No, I meant. In the same sleeping bag.”

And just like that, Dean’s back on that fucking couch, blanketed by Sam’s warmth. More and more over the past weeks, it’s been the couch and not Hell; Sam and not Alistair. Dean never thought he’d be able to compare the two, and now that he can, he wishes he couldn’t. Not when he can’t ever have it again.

“I don’t like it either,” Sam says into the silence, “But it’s going to get really cold in here, and—”

“I’ve had worse,” Dean interrupts. “Not like it’ll kill us or anything.”

“I wouldn’t be suggesting this if I didn’t think it might, Dean.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you should’ve thought of that before you decided to cut and run.”

Sam lets out a short, huffing breath—like Dean is being unreasonable or something—and starts, “Dean—”

“I’m not fucking sharing a sleeping bag with you, Sam. End of story.”

And just like usual these days, Sam doesn’t bother arguing.

Dean was sure this would be fine.

Dean thought he knew what cold felt like.

Dean’s a fucking moron.

He grits his teeth as another, stronger shudder takes his body, staring out into the dim glow of the storm outside. The fire is a distant memory, and the cold has grown barbed thorns and teeth, sinking deep into Dean’s skin. It’s in his bones now, actually: making him shake uncontrollably in his sleeping bag. He can hear his own teeth chattering and can’t do anything about it—hopes they won't shatter apart like the shards of ice they feel like right now.

He wonders if Sam’s doing any better in his bag.

Dean’s debating folding and rolling over to ask if Sam’s still willing to try the whole conserving body heat thing when a hand drops on his shoulder and his sleeping bag starts to unzip. He jerks in protest as the meager bit of heat he managed to collect spills out, replaced by a fresh leak of ice from the air, and tries to sit up past the restraining grip.

Sam doesn’t say anything as he shoves Dean as far over to one side as he can and pushes in beside him, digging a bony knee into Dean’s back as he wriggles around in an attempt to get the bag zipped back up.

“Wh-who invi-vited yuh-you?” Dean manages, and then gives himself a mental kick. He doesn’t know why he’s protesting when he was thinking about asking for this five seconds ago. He just can’t seem to stop himself from pushing Sam away—seems addicted to self-destructing any way he can.

“Shut up,” Sam mutters, shoving one of his feet between Dean’s. “I’m not gonna let you freeze.”

“’M fine,” Dean lies, because he’s just that much of an asshole, but Sam ignores the protest and finishes zipping them in.

There isn’t a whole lot of room left now, and nowhere at all for Dean to get away from the press of Sam’s body. It isn’t a problem at first—Sam’s warm, and the heat feels good enough that Dean wants to moan. His body gradually stops shaking and he leans back, relaxing into the warmth.

Which is when he realizes just how good it actually feels, and things start to get awkward. He tenses again as he realizes that his cock is half hard against the edge of the sleeping bag. His heart races and his breath speeds.

Sam shifts behind him, worming an arm around Dean’s side and splaying his hand over Dean’s chest. Which leaves Dean feeling a little more transparent than he wants to be right now. Fuck, Sam needs to back off.

“Sam,” he says, making the word a warning.

Sam’s hand doesn’t move. “I’m not going to do anything,” he whispers, breath warm against the back of Dean’s head.

“Get your hand off my chest.”

That’s a direct order, and Sam starts to obey before hesitating and saying, “I know you don’t believe me, but I’m sorry. I never meant to—I don’t know what I was thinking. But Dean, I’m not going to touch you like that again. Okay? You don’t have to worry.”

“No, you made that pretty clear,” Dean mutters. “Now get your hand off me before you’re drawing back a bloody stump, because I _will_ bite you.”

This time Sam does obey, sticking his hand between his chest and Dean’s back instead. They lie there quietly for a while and then Sam says, in a thick, stressed voice, “I know I don’t deserve it, but can you talk to me tonight? We don’t have to talk about anything important, I just. I miss your voice.”

“Gonna miss a lot more than that when we get to Atlanta,” Dean says sarcastically—because seriously, what kind of bullshit does Sam think he’s selling, saying crap like that.

Except the silence takes on a hurt quality, and pressed together like they are, Dean can’t pretend that he doesn’t feel Sam shaking behind him.

“Are you _crying_?” he demands incredulously.

“I’m sorry,” Sam whispers—and yeah, he’s very definitely crying. “I’m so sorry, Dean.”

“Christ,” Dean mutters. He hates that his chest is doing that funny, hollow aching thing: hates that even now, even with everything Sam is doing to him—even though Sam is throwing him out like a piece of fucking trash—his first impulse is to turn around and hold his brother.

“Sorry,” Sam says again, choking on his tears, and Dean grimaces.

“I don’t know what you _want_ , Sam,” he says.

“I want to—can you listen to me? Dean, please, can you just listen for once?”

Dean wants to point out that he’s been listening to a whole lot of silence over the last month or so—Sam’s choice, not his—but he manages to swallow that remark and instead grunts, “Kind of a captive audience here.”

Except that doesn’t reassure Sam the way Dean wants it to. He can tell from the way Sam is suddenly convulsively clutching the back of Dean’s shirt. “I’m sorry,” Sam says again. “I won’t. I promise I won’t, Dean, but I just—I have to apologize. It isn’t enough, I know, but you have to believe that I never meant to hurt you, and I—God, I would do anything to take it back.”

Christ, Dean’s going to start crying himself in a minute. “Then why don’t you?” he whispers, sounding pathetic and hating himself for it. “Not like it’s that hard. ‘Dean, I want you to stay.’ See? Even a monkey can do it.”

Sam’s breath hitches in something that sounds like confused surprise. He sniffs, and swallows thickly, and then says, “You think I’m talking about you leaving?”

“No, I think we’re talking about _you_ leaving,” Dean corrects. “Why, what did you think we were talking about?”

“About—about what happened outside of Rosewood.”

Oh. Another delightful topic. “Okay, what about it?”

“What about—” Sam starts to repeat, and then blurts, “How can you be so blasé about it, man? I fucking raped you, I—”

It’s ridiculous enough to startle a laugh from him and Sam shuts up immediately. “You raped me? That’s fucking rich.”

“You—Dean, you said no, you said—”

“Yeah, well, I say a lot of things. You don’t think I could’ve gotten you off me if I really wanted to?”

Dean wasn’t sure of that himself in the heat of the moment, of course, but he’s had time to think about it since then, and there were any number of ways he could have stopped Sam. If he’d really wanted to. If Hell hadn’t twisted him around into a brother-fucking pervert. Christ.

“If you wanted it, then why did you—why the hell didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I’m usually so forthcoming about topics that _don’t_ involve heart-to-hearts about how much I want my baby brother’s cock up my ass,” Dean snorts. “Fuck, Sammy, I know we’ve been a little out of step lately, but you _have_ met me, right?”

“I don’t—Dean, I don’t know how to read you anymore.”

“Feeling’s mutual, dude.”

Sam’s quiet for a long time and then, hesitantly, he says, “So where does that leave us?”

Dean’s not sure himself, but he at least has a good idea of where to start. “Well, are you still planning on ditching me in Atlanta?”

“No,” Sam says immediately, tugging Dean more firmly against himself with the hand at the back of his shirt. “No, not if you don’t want to go. Do you?” He sounds so uncertain when he asks, like a little kid, and Dean should leave him hanging for being such a monumental dick, but he can’t bear to.

“No.”

“Okay,” Sam breathes out shakily. “Okay, good.”

Dean could leave it there, but he thinks this might be the last chance he has to talk to Sam without having to look him in the eyes, and the moment is already as share and care as it can get without either of them losing their dicks, so he continues, “But I’m fucked up, Sam. And not just—it isn’t just us. It’s the apocalypse, and Hell, and I’m still not over the Ruby thing, okay?”

Sam laughs softly—not healthily, but with a little more humor than Dean’s used to. “In case you didn’t notice, I’m not doing so hot myself,” he says, unhooking his hand from Dean’s shirt and pushing it around to his chest again.

Dean’s not entirely sure he’s comfortable with Sam’s hand resting there, right on top of his heartbeat. It’s too intimate—too naked. But the solid weight is also warming his chest, and it feels ... it feels good, like things are knitting together inside of him.

They lie like that for a while, quiet and more aligned than they have been in years, and then Sam says, “I missed this.”

“Missed what?” Dean says. “Cause I don’t know about you, but this whole fucking my brother thing is kind of a first for me.”

It’s a lie. It’s such a fucking lie, Dean can barely stand himself.

But Sam doesn’t seem to notice, shaking his head and saying, “Not that, the—being close to you. I missed this.”

“Yeah,” Dean admits after a brief struggle with the defensive wisecracks that want to come out. “Me too.”

He tries to be still and enjoy the moment the way Sam probably is—and fuck, he could easily get addicted to the lightness in his chest—but in the end he just can’t help himself, rubbing his ass back against Sam with a deliberate motion. Sam lets out a hiss, fingers digging into Dean’s chest as his cock fills, and Dean smirks.

“Something wrong?” he asks innocently, wriggling again, and after a brief struggle Sam gets his hand down from Dean’s chest and clamps it over his hip, stilling him.

“Don’t start something you can’t finish,” Sam warns.

Dean grins wider, stomach trembling with excitement. “Who said anything about not finishing?” he responds.

Sam swears, low and hurt, as his cock gives is violent twitch. “There isn’t room for this, Dean,” he complains. And if Dean had any doubts who he’s in bed with, that would silence them. Alistair never managed to get that whiny, petulant tone down right.

“Sure there is,” Dean says. “Besides, we’re supposed to be keeping warm. C’mon, dude. Give me a little of that body heat.”

“Wow,” Sam replies dryly. “That was actually completely unappealing.”

But his fingers are dipping into the sweats Dean jumped into before huddling down into bed, toying with the waistband like he’s considering pushing them down.

“Stop bitching about my pillow talk and shove your cock in me already.”

“No lube,” Sam points out, but his voice sounds closer, and a moment later Dean feels his brother’s mouth on the side of his neck. He shifts, making room, and then sucks in a breath as Sam bites down.

It’s good. It’s just as good as Dean knew it would be. “Fuck,” he groans.

“God, I want to,” Sam answers, nuzzling the wet, sore spot he left on Dean’s throat. His hand is completely inside Dean’s sweats now, moving around to the front and gripping his cock. Dean tries to get his legs open for his brother and fails miserably.

“Dude, unzip the bag. I can’t move over here.”

Sam’s mouth comes down on his neck again—sucking this time, marking him up—and Dean shakes as his brother thrusts against his ass and the small of his back.

“Sam,” he tries again, more breathlessly. “C’mon. Need some more room.”

“I thought you said there was plenty of room,” Sam replies, abandoning Dean’s cock to finger his balls—not a lot of space for him to work those, so it’s more of a tease than anything else.

“Changed m’mind,” Dean pants. He tries to at least turn over and can’t do that either: Sam’s body is in the way, caging him against the side of the sleeping bag. “Damn it!”

Sam chuckles and makes a languid thrust. “I changed my mind too. I think I’ve got plenty of room.”

“Asshole,” Dean mutters, trying to elbow him. Sam’s too close, though, and the sleeping bag’s too tight, and Dean’s beginning to think Sam is deliberately squishing him against the far side. “You’re a control freak, you know that?”

“Are you trying to tell me you’re not getting off on it?” Sam asks, still teasing his cock and balls with fumbling, too-brief strokes.

Hell yeah, Dean is getting off on it. But he isn’t ready to admit it—might never be ready for that—so instead he growls, “What do you want me to do, beg?”

“That’d be a start,” Sam agrees, voice warm and teasing.

Dean considers telling his brother where he can put that particular fantasy, but the idea is in his head now, and he remembers how it felt to beg Alistair. He remembers how nuts it drove him when Alistair let him pretend, when it was Sam’s name in his mouth. And what comes out when he opens his mouth is, “Please. Sammy, please fuck me.”

Sam’s breath catches—as though he didn’t actually think Dean would do it—and the sound goes right to Dean’s cock.

“Please,” he says again, letting a little more desperation seep into his voice. “Fuck me. I want to feel you. God, Sammy, please.”

“Lube,” Sam whispers, but he’s back to licking and sucking at Dean’s neck again, and his hand is moving back up to the waistband of Dean’s sweats and tugging at them insistently.

“Don’t need it.”

And Sam’s apparently going to take him at his word as far as the necessity of lube is concerned, because he gives a particularly strong yank and Dean feels his sweats slip down below the curve of his ass. Then Sam’s weight recedes for a moment—and yeah, Sam’s definitely hogging all the room in here—before returning. Dean can feel his brother’s bare skin against his now, both their sweatpants pulled down just enough to make this work, and Sam uses his hand to guide the head of his cock between Dean’s cheeks.

“You’re gonna be so tight like this,” he pants into Dean’s ear. He shifts his grip on his cock, feeling along the crease of Dean’s ass with his fingers until he locates the tight ring of Dean’s pucker. Dean tries again to spread his legs—instinctive response to one of Sam’s fingers prodding against his opening—and gets just as far as he did the first time. He snorts, annoyed, and then bites back on a grunt as Sam’s finger spears into him.

Fantasies or not, it’s been a while since he took anything up there, let alone anything dry—not since Hell, actually, and those weren’t exactly the best experiences. He scrunches his eyes shut as Sam forces a second finger in and starts trying to stretch him out a little, trying not to think about all those other times—unwelcome for the first thirty five years, until he got good enough at his job for Alistair to reward him. It hurt even then, of course—even when he begged for it the way he was just begging Sam, but Dean had learned by then to get off on the pain, at least a little.

In the end, he figured out how to crave it.

Christ, if Sam knew he was this fucked up, Dean’s pretty sure his brother wouldn’t want him anymore.

It takes him a while to realize that the fingers in his ass are gone. The ache is still there, deep and throbbing, but Sam’s left hand is on his hip now, and he’s somehow gotten his right up to cushion Dean’s cheek.

“What’s wrong?” Dean asks, blinking his eyes open.

“You’re crying.”

Oh. Yeah, Dean guesses he is. “It’s not you,” he says.

“I know.” And Sam does: Dean can tell from the certainty in his brother’s voice.

“Why’d you stop, then?”

“Because I’m not going to fuck you when you’re crying, Dean,” Sam answers patiently. “I can wait.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Dean mutters.

“I kind of think it is.”

“I kind of think you’re a girl, but you don’t see me buying you pretty, pretty dresses and putting bows in your hair. Now come on and fuck me.”

But Sam says “No,” and keeps stroking Dean’s cheek. Which feels good, but is in no way what Dean wants right now.

And there’s only one way for Dean to get what he wants.

Damn it.

“I was thinking about Alistair,” he confesses, forcing the words out. Sam’s hand stills, but the words hurt less than Dean thought they would, and he continues, “They fucked me in Hell. Bunch of times. It got so I didn’t really care anymore. And then, after I—when I picked up the knife, Alistair used to. Anyway, it got so I liked it.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam says softly.

“That’s not—you’re missing the point, dude. I’m not looking for pity. It happened, whatever. I’ve had worse. I just. I wanted you to know I like it, okay? I like getting fucked, and I like when it’s rough. I liked it when you held me down before.”

“If you like it so much, then why are you crying?”

Excellent question. Dean takes a moment to scrounge up the answer and then says, “Because that pretty much makes me a freak, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s fucked up, anyway, and I don’t know. I don’t know if you’re going to want me anymore, now that you know.”

“Yes,” Sam says simply.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, I still want you. In case you haven’t noticed, Dean, I’m pretty stupidly in love with you. You want to dress me up in garters and a corset, we’ll work something out. This?” He kisses Dean’s shoulder gently and rubs his hand down over Dean’s ass, fingers seeking out his hole again and pushing in. Dean moans, pushing back onto the penetration. “This I can _definitely_ work with.”

Sam scissors his fingers suddenly, sending a deeper, stabbing pulse of pain through Dean, and he shudders as his cock fills.

“Sam,” he pants, clawing futilely at the side of the sleeping bag for something to hang on to. He has no clue where the man behind him has come from—would have sworn Sam was the most vanilla dude on earth when it comes to sex, even if he was hoping otherwise.

But Sam is still Sam, and even as he continues to open Dean with rough movements of his fingers, he spoils the moment by whispering, “I love you.”

 _Oh Christ,_ Dean thinks as a violent shudder takes him. “Don’t,” he blurts.

Nudging Dean’s jaw, Sam breathes, “I’ll play this your way, Dean. I’ll fuck you open dry and hard enough you aren’t going to be walking anywhere for a few days. But I’m not Alistair, and I can’t do it without telling you how I feel, so you’re going to have to put up with it.”

“Sam,” Dean moans, begging as his chest gives a sharp twist, but Sam’s fingers are still plunging in and out of him—three now, spreading that sweet burn around and making Dean buck against the side of the sleeping bag—and he can’t manage anything else.

“I love you,” Sam says again. He’s kissing Dean’s throat, gentle this time—a dizzying contrast to the violence of his fingers. “I love you. I love you.”

Dean thinks those words should lose some of their effect after a while, but instead each repetition shocks into him more strongly, rooting deep and filling his chest with a relentless, swelling ache that drowns out the burn in his ass. Dean’s lost enough in the feeling that he doesn’t realize Sam has stopped opening him until the words stop as well, Sam’s fingers awkwardly stroking at Dean’s hair. He blinks, coming out of his stupor a little, and realizes that his brother’s cock is pressed up right against his pucker, the head just pressing against his entrance but not quite breaching him.

“Sam,” he chokes out.

“You with me?” Sam asks, kissing Dean’s cheek. “I want you here for this.”

Dean’s body gives another involuntary tremor and he shakes his head. “Sam. Sammy, I can’t—I can’t do this. Can’t you just—Christ, can’t you just fuck me like a normal person?”

Except there’s nothing normal about what they’re doing and Dean knows it. He isn’t surprised when Sam ignores the protest and rests his forehead against the side of Dean’s cheek.

“Ready?” Sam breathes.

 _No,_ Dean thinks, except he thinks his heart might actually stop beating if Sam doesn’t do this right fucking now. “Go,” he manages. “Sammy, go.”

The first thrust is everything Dean wants it to be, rough and claiming and deep. He lets out a choked cry as he’s filled, Sam’s cock stretching him wide and full in a way Sam’s fingers could never properly prepare him for. Dean’s hips twitch, his body instinctively trying to escape the intrusion, but the sleeping bag is holding him in place and Sam keeps coming—deep deeper deepest—before finally bottoming out with his dick wedged so far inside Dean’s body it feels like Dean should be choking on it.

“Fuck,” he whispers.

“Christ, Dean,” Sam says, his voice both strained and wondering. “You’re so fucking tight.”

Dean’s pretty sure his ass isn’t the problem, cause he’s had lots of stuff shoved up there and nothing has ever left him quite this breathless. No, that’s all Sam. Sam and his cock that’s apparently a lot bigger than Dean was giving Sam credit for.

“Are you ready?” Sam asks. “Can I move?”

Dean doesn’t think he’ll ever be ready for this, but he knows that he needs it. He knows he wants it—wants Sam fucking him wide and raw—so he nods.

Sam takes him at his word, wrenching out and shoving back in as violently as he can manage with the minimal room they have. It burns—all the promise Dean sensed during that frenzied rutting on the couch fulfilled—and Dean groans, pushing back for it as best as he’s able. Sam gives it to him in silence for a few, glorious moments, and then starts back in with the talking.

“Love you. So fucking perfect, Dean, you don’t even fucking know. I love you. I love you so fucking much.”

That shuddery, exposed feeling takes him again, stronger this time, and Dean squeezes his eyes shut against it. He doesn’t get to have this. They don’t get to have this.

“Let go,” Sam’s saying now. “Dean, baby, let go.”

“I can’t,” Dean grunts.

“You can,” Sam insists, moving his hand from Dean’s hip and getting it on his cock. He doesn’t have enough space to jack him, so he’s just holding it, but even that’s enough to drive Dean completely nuts.

God, he’s not going to survive this when they have room to actually move.

“I love you,” Sam says again. “Come on, Dean. Say it. I want to hear it. Please, Dean. Please.”

It’s dirty pool, begging Dean like that while he’s fucking him so perfectly, and Dean holds out for all of a second before opening his mouth and moaning, “Yeah, Sammy. Love you. Always. Love you so fucking much.”

Funny, but the words don’t seem quite so terrifying once they’re out of his mouth. Also, Sam shuts up to listen, which makes Dean feel a little safer, so he keeps going, running his own mouth while Sam’s cock pounds into him.

They fall apart almost at the same time. Sam spills a fraction of a moment sooner, tightening his hold on Dean’s cock in the midst of his climax, and the pressure makes Dean follow him over. Dean keeps thrusting through his own orgasm, rubbing his cock against Sam’s hand and the side of the sleeping bag—it’s going to be a fucking mess; they’ll need to replace it with a new one—until Sam releases Dean’s cock to grab his hip again, stilling him.

Suddenly, Dean can’t focus on anything but the throb of his ass, where Sam’s cock is still nestled and twitching. He’s wet deep inside where Sam is spurting, and he shifts his legs slightly at the uncomfortable sensation. It’s his least favorite part, this kind of marking—and he lets out a relieved sigh when Sam finally pulls out.

Dean bears down immediately, inner walls rippling as he forces the semen outside of his body where it belongs, and then jumps as Sam’s fingers push back inside of his channel with slow, fucking motions.

“What’re you doing?” he slurs.

“I like the way you feel,” Sam answers, giving him a quick kiss on the jaw. “Is this okay? I’ll stop if you want me to.”

Dean’s not sure of the answer to that one. He doesn’t like feeling wet down there, and the slick slide of Sam’s fingers is making that sensation pretty impossible to ignore, but ... but it doesn’t actually feel bad. Feels pretty good when Sam finds his prostate and starts to rub.

“No,” he gasps. “Keep going.”

Sam does, silent now that he’s being gentle. Although Dean guesses that using four fingers in a hole that’s currently hot and swollen from earlier abuse might not actually qualify as ‘gentle’ for most people. And Sam keeps rubbing his thumb around the puffy rim, so Dean knows what he’s thinking of.

Finally he opens his mouth and asks, “You gonna fist me or what?”

He thinks for a moment that Sam will. His brother stops playing, and his thumb pushes—just a hint of pressure—and then he pulls his fingers back out.

“Some other time,” he says. “I want you to be able to spread your legs for me.”

“Christ, Sammy,” Dean mutters as his half hard cock twitches. “Warn a guy.”

“Sorry,” Sam says, sounding anything but, and then snuggles close. His arm finds its way around Dean’s side again, and his messy fingers rest on Dean’s chest.

“This is going to be really gross tomorrow,” Dean points out.

“Yeah,” Sam agrees, sounding not at all bothered by the prospect. Dean considers for a moment and then decides that he doesn’t really care either. He’s too content right now.

They lie there quietly for a long while—it isn’t snuggling if neither of them cops to it later—and then Sam says, “You think this is it?”

He doesn’t mean them, Dean senses. He means the world—the blizzard outside and the Croats and all of the dead bodies turning the globe into the universe’s largest morgue. A few hours ago, Dean would have said yes. He would have said yes without thinking twice.

Now, he answers, “I dunno. Seems like maybe that depends on us.”

Sam’s arm tightens around him, keeping Dean close. “Yeah, I guess it does.”


End file.
